Archive for December, 2010

So Christmas was all fine and wonderful and stuff. I actually went to church at my mother’s behest on Christmas Eve, and the ceiling actually did not burst into huge tongues of demonic flame.

I was a little surprised by my church experience, though. We went to the Lutheran church that was connected to the J-Man’s old school, of which my mother had grown very fond.

Lutherans? You don’t know how to act.

Maybe it was just the two-time-a-year churchgoers that were the culprits, but damn, there were some talky people in church, so much so that even a lifelong heathen like myself found it disrespectful. People (particularly the done-up blondes that populate this particular church) were allowing their children to screw around and scream and cry and run up and down the aisles – and I’m not talking about tiny babies either (well, obviously tiny babies wouldn’t be doing much running), I’m talking about grown-ass kids. It annoyed me.

This was primarily a choral service, with just a couple of short readings and a short sermon, and I think I would really have enjoyed the music had it not been for the idiotic chattering Trixies and their offspring, who desperately needed a blowdart or two full of Ritalin.

Where I come from, if you go to temple or church, you sit your ass down, and you shut the hell up, and woe to you if you fail to do either.

I know, I know, it was CHRISTMAS, and I shouldn’t be such a GRINCH. Sigh. The holidays blanket a multitude of sins, don’t they??

It just surprised me.

On Christmas morning my father came over to open gifts while my stepdad went to mass.

Read that again.

We put the funk in dysfunctional, do we not??

The J-Man was absolutely thrilled with his gifts and called it the best Christmas ever, as he does every year. My mother and father seemed very happy with their stuff as well, and I was over the moon with my treadmill and some very nice stuff from my mother.

After my dad took off, we cooked all late morning in preparation for my stepsister and a couple of my stepbrothers and their kids.

Can I just tell you how much I love pierogis? Not as much as I love turkey, to be sure, but ALMOST AS MUCH. They are little pockets of potato love.

We had a great meal, opened gifts again, and basically sat around for the rest of the night complaining about how fat we all were now given the gluttonous week.

Yesterday was my birthday, which I consider a holiday and you should, too. Sadly, I did nothing, because my stepdad had shoulder surgery and is taking it… poorly.

My mom took the day off of work, which was a blessed thing, because believe me, it took both of us to handle him. I think that he is both the only person ever to feel pain, to have been cut open, and to have been dizzy or numb. At least this is what I have been led to believe. Now this is a man who survived Vietnam. He is no wuss! That must have been some fucking intense surgery, because he is ready to eat a gun.

Needless to say, I am having a blast nursing him back to health today while my mom is back at work. We had the following exchange this morning.

“JENNY!!!”
*runs down the hall, panicked* “WHAT???!”
“Where’s the damp washcloth you gave me?”
“It’s on your forehead.”
“Oh. Never mind then.”

Having a high tolerance for drugs, I view Vicodin like it’s Tylenol. No big.

Apparently I am So Wrong. This man is so stoned it’s not even funny. He even looks high. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so high, unless they were on hospital drugs like Demerol. Or maybe crack, but he lacks the enthusiasm of your average crackhead. He just lies there and groans.

So that’s my week. Everyone keeps asking what I’m doing for New Year’s Eve, and the answer is Zip. New Year’s is a couples holiday. Even the local bars are selling tickets to couples, and damned if I’m going to hang out in some bar by myself when it’s an all-couples trip. I plan to buy a bottle of champagne and stay home with the J-Man watching Dick Clark, I mean, Ryan Seacrest. Boring, but there you have it.

How were your holidays? Dirty details in the comments, if you please.

Christmas cannot be in five days. I refuse to allow it. I need more time. I’m not done wrapping, I haven’t baked a single damned cookie, and allegedly we’re having at least three more guests on Christmas Day that I haven’t purchased gifts for.

If the Xanax people haven’t gotten in on holiday advertising, they’re just plain ignorant.

My mother’s family’s holiday party was this past weekend. This is the loud side of the family, the side that hunts and goes to Country Thunder (local country music festival) and is damned fun to drink with. This year we had a large supply of both glug and Jell-O shots (my aunt thinks of everything) in addition to the pierogi and my homemade lasagna, so the volume was unbelievable.

Things discussed over dinner:

- whether or not my mom clogged the toilet, and how big the offending turd must have been
- how often is healthy to poop
- how often each respective family member poops
- whether or not it is respectable to poop at work
- who poops where (this quickly degraded into “who can poop anywhere”)
- poop, quality and quantity thereof

I looked at my mother at one point and said, “See?? THIS is where I get it from.”

The kids were all in the basement (where they belong), running around and having a fabulous time shrieking at top volume with no adults screaming at them. The adults were all upstairs having a blast getting drunk and screaming at top volume with no kids shrieking at them. Plus, there were at least five kinds of cookies. All in all, it was a very well-planned event.

One of the gifts I received was a rechargeable electric wine opener. Anything that gets me to my wine faster is much appreciated, so kudos to my aunt and uncle for their thoughtfulness.

After the party, since I was already half in the bag, I decided to go to my local bar.

Now you might think that this is stupid, but you would be missing one important fact: I never, ever have seizures when I drink. Therefore, why not enjoy myself?

Luckily, the Stolichnaya vodka people were in residence and giving away free drinks. For free. Did I mention that these drinks didn’t cost anything? Oh my God. If I were not already rather tipsy from the tequila-infused Jell-O and glug (which I am now convinced is the devil’s drink), I would soon become uproariously drunk.

You have to understand that typically, I drink nothing but beer and the occasional glass of wine. I am not a mixed-drink or shot drinker (unless I’m in Green Bay, heh).

Thankfully, I’m a happy drunk, and I do believe I let everyone in the bar know it. I closed the place down, got a ride home (Thank GOD, because walking the four blocks in the freezing cold whilst drunk would have sucked rocks), and promptly passed out without drinking half a gallon of water or taking Tylenol, which for me staves off hangovers very well.

This was monumentally stupid and led to one of the worst hangovers of my life. I was in a bad way yesterday and spent half the day sleeping and the other half groaning about how I wished I was asleep.

Stupid. But I learned why it’s best not to mix beer with Jell-O shots with glug with vodka! I won’t do THAT again.

Amazingly, I received a treadmill for Christmas from my dad (the young girlfriend has had an amazing effect on his generosity if nothing else) and will be spending the rest of the week putting that together while performing all of my other Christmas duties. I am thrilled to death to have received it, but I am afraid that I will probably assemble something that looks more like post-apocalyptic art.

You say there won’t be art after the apocalypse?

EXACTLY.

Right now I have a lot of parts, and while the directions seem fairly straight-forward, I’m sure that I will find some way to fuck them up.

Or I will just call my buddy Dave, who knows everything. I call him for every little bit of technical advice from “Hey, this foot-pedal ain’t a-workin’!” to “I done fucked up my modem agin!” and he never fails to explain things to me like I’m a four-year-old until I get them.

Here’s to good friends and insane family, and I hope that all of you have a very merry Christmas (Kwanzaa, belated Chanukah, Festivus, whatever. You get my drift.) Much love to you and yours.

So my dad, the J-Man, and I had a breakfast date two weekends ago. We do this whenever we can, which isn’t often, since the old man is crazy busy with work/being a slumlord/reigning as the Karaoke King of the Midwest.

He pulled up in his Liberty to pick us up, and lo and behold, there was a chick in the front seat.

Now, I’ve heard about this chick. About a month ago, my father went on a cruise with her, apparently because the friend that was supposed to go had DIED, and in spite of her loss they had a wonderful time. They’ve been friends for years and the relationship naturally developed into something else, something wonderful, something I’d rather not know about.

I had but one question when he reported back from The Islands. “How old is she??”

“Old enough.”

Oh, God. This told me that she was probably either younger than me or the same age. My father (Karaoke King of the Midwest) has young friends.

How old is my dad? Well, I’m sworn to secrecy on that one, but let’s just say that he qualifies for something that begins with Social and ends with Security.

Did I just slip? Aw, shucks!

The month of November went by, and I received several calls from my father laughingly complaining that he had seen her every single night since the cruise and therefore had no time for karaoke. Every night for a month. This made me personally see a little relationship burnout in his future, but who am I to judge?

I didn’t know anything about her other than that she was probably young, thought my father was HILARIOUS, and was probably a gold digger.

Naturally, when I saw a female head in the truck waiting to breakfast with us, I rolled my eyes. The J-Man, ever eagle-eyed, noticed. “She’s really nice, Mom.” He had met her before the cruise. “Give her a chance.”

I promised to give the woman who would spend my inheritance a chance, and away we rolled.

She was chatty with my dad, joking around, but had little to say to J. or I. I figured she was probably nervous, given the fact that she looked younger than me. She had long brown hair and a trendy hat on, and also a nice leather jacket. My dad let J. and I out of the car and then pulled the car up to the curb to let Miss Thing out so that she wouldn’t get her shoes ruined in the snow. I rolled my eyes again. “MOM,” intoned the J-Man.

We all sat down and I got a good look at her face. Very, very few wrinkles. She had to be about 32, 33. What in the name of God was she doing with my dad?

I mean, my dad was cool, but COME ON.

I was nice. I chatted, and so did she. She is a nurse at a local clinic, so at least she is gainfully employed, and we chatted about that. The breakfast was a buffet, so once while going to fill our plates at the trough, she mentioned that she went to *city high school*. I mentioned that I went to *other city high school*. “Oh yeah?” she said, “What year did you graduate?”

“‘92. How about you?” I waited with gritted teeth.

“‘88.”

‘88?? The bitch was 40?? I had more wrinkles than that when I was neither smiling nor frowning!! I decided to hate her on principle.

I walked back to the table while her skinny ass was still poring over some Danish or some other shit that I couldn’t dream of eating, and I hissed at my dad. “She’s 40?? She looks younger than me!!” He had the nerve to laugh.

I decided to hate my father, too.

The J-Man, who is special and kind and good, said, “She totally doesn’t look younger than you.” Have I mentioned how much I love my child?

When she got back to the table, we chatted for a while, and then – and I still have no fucking clue why she decided to admit this – she told me her dark secret. Now, I didn’t know this woman from a hole in the ground, but I have the kind of face that people like to talk to. People just TELL me shit. I can be in the grocery store and someone will start telling me their entire life story. If I’m in the doctor’s office, forget it. I know everybody in that damned place by the time I leave. I am a people magnet. Maybe it’s because I don’t generally talk too much.

Anyway, the girl told me she had Botox. I guess she had just been injected the previous week. “Look,” she said, “I can’t move my eyebrows.” And it was true. She couldn’t.

I was curious, so I said, “What exactly did you have injected?

“The furrows between my eyebrows. And underneath my eyes, and the corners of my eyes, and my crow’s feet. And here. And here. It’s $150.00 per wrinkle, so it got kind of expensive.”

$150.00 a fucking wrinkle?? Was she putting me on? Crow’s feet alone house quite a few wrinkles.

If my father paid for that I am going to kick him square in the nuts.

It’s Botox! It doesn’t even LAST! I think it lasts, what, six months?? (am too lazy to research)

What a colossal waste of cash.

Now I joke about having plastic surgery all the time, and if I could afford it, I would have a tummy tuck in a New York minute. I had a C-section and boy, do I need that shit. So I suppose that makes me just as bad. But this woman couldn’t have looked that bad before, I don’t think. She probably just had the regular little lines that most of us over thirty start to see creeping about. I mean, buy some Olay and get over yourself, already.

I don’t know. She does act like she actually likes my dad a lot, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being bitchy to this woman when she really does care about the man. He’s a good guy, after all.

He’s just had bad experiences with gold diggers in the past, and they’re usually young and attractive, and they usually start out like this, with the woman wanting to spend a lot of time with him, and they end in heartbreak for the old man. He even married one, and that was a ridiculous disaster.

This woman seemed nice, personable, even sort of smart. But would she date a broke *cough*sixty-five*cough*-year-old man, even if he was funny and the Karaoke King of the Midwest? I highly doubt it.

On the way back from the restaurant – and I swear on my child’s eyes I’m not making this up – Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” came on the radio. It could not have been more perfect or more hilarious. I very nearly peed my pants.

“I love this song. Turn it up.” I said.

“I love this song TOO!” she squealed.

I just smiled.

I’m probably a big old bitch.

Happy Tuesday.

My kid is twelve now (wrap your brain around THAT, longtime readers), and although I’ve noticed that with every passing year the Stuff He Wants list has grown more and more expensive, this year it has become downright ridiculous.

An iPod Touch (don’t we all, kid): $250.00
several fifty-dollar video games: $250.00
DC shoes: $60-80.00
DC clothes: $300.00, and that’s a cheap estimate
An electric toothbrush (only gift I’m inclined to buy): around $50 bucks for a cheap one
A new hard drive for his XBox: I have no idea, but it sounds expensive
He also started to ask me for a 4G cell phone, but I just laughed

Remember Lincoln Logs? I’ll bet you could buy a whole big set for under twenty dollars.

Seriously, this child is living in an alternate reality, one in which his mother is not living on a very meager fixed income. I’m sure that there are kids at school who get these types of gifts, but I’m also sure that their parents are professionals who spoil the shit out of them.

I can remember when he was happy as a clam playing in a cardboard box. Maybe if I got him a big enough box, those sweet, sunshiny days would return.

“You know that if you get anything off this list, it will just be one or two small things, right?”
“OK.”
“Because we’re not rich, and because you don’t really need all that stuff.”
“And because I should ask Grandpa.”
“Heh.”

My father is what you would call well-off, but he is also what you would call a man who is desperate to spend every last penny on tools, workout equipment, and gadgetry during his lifetime so that his family doesn’t see a red cent.

I kid. He’s actually quite generous with both the J-Man and I most of the time, but that doesn’t mean that I want J. to take advantage of him by asking for ridiculous things like trendy clothes and eighty dollar shoes.

Tinkertoys. Remember Tinkertoys? They were just sticks and wooden spools with holes. Simple. Cheap. Nice.

I would so love to see my kid sit down with a damn Tinkertoy that it would make me weep tears of joy. I think I would actually go to church/temple/a mosque/tai fucking chi in the park if I saw him pick up something that wasn’t attached to a monitor.

I went Christmas shopping with my stepdad yesterday. This is sort of like Christmas shopping with a statue. You have to stop and pick it up and move it every few feet, because it stands stark still and stares at every motherfucking thing in the store.

Naturally, I was overjoyed.

We somehow got a lot done, and I knocked out my mother (thick sweaters – no blood), my father (cool shirts – second childhood), my friends (sweaters), and mostly the J-Man (damnable game and toothbrush). My mom already took care of the nieces and nephews and my sister, and all I have left to buy for is my stepdad the statue, the Man Who Wants Nothing Yet Is Fascinated By Everything.

Tune in next time, when I write about my father’s new, rare, serious girlfriend.

Happy Thursday.

Winter has come early to Indiana, and although years and years of frozen Midwestern winters should find me amply prepared, I find myself wrapped in my electric blanket, fingers white and numb, shaking my frozen fist at the sky and screaming, “NOOOO!”

We are all sick, most notably the J-Man, who sounds like a three-pack-a-day smoker or perhaps Selma from the Simpsons (who actually IS a three-pack-a-day smoker, I think). He thinks his voice is changing, but I think he’s on the road to laryngitis.

My mother is constantly shivering and putting on layer after layer of clothing, and she is even taking naps, and naps are rare for the pint-sized powerhouse.

I am merely shuffling around in fleece pants, plush socks, and my super-thick terrycloth bathrobe; looking much like the Michelin Man, but feeling slightly lukewarm. My face and nose are red and I’m coughing a lot.

To whom due we owe these maladies, we who rarely venture outside except to walk to the car/bus and back?

My stepdad. My stepdad is a Heat Miser. That son of a bitch refuses to turn the heat up past 68 even if cats frozen stiff like catsicles line the staircase. He simply will not budge.

“It’s not cold in here,” he says, pointing out his jeans and three-quarter-sleeved T-shirt. “You should go in my bedroom. Now THAT’S cold.”

He maintains a separate thermostat for his own room, and he keeps it at 54 degrees.

54 degrees. If that isn’t completely insane, than I don’t know what is.

To his credit, the man is almost never sick, so perhaps he fucking freezes the germs away, but I don’t plan to try it.

“You can sleep better in the cold,” he says. “You should give it a shot. It’s bracing.”

I’m sure it is. I’m sure being a member of the Polar Bear Club is quite bracing as well, but I still reserve the right to believe that those fuckers are insane.

Another reason I remain chilled is that I must smoke outside or in the garage. This is a Good Rule, a Healthy Rule, one that is beneficial to us all, particularly the J-Man, and mind you, I’m not complaining…

…but I’m just going to complain a little. Smoking outside or in the garage fucking SUCKS. It’s freezing. It’s freezing even with a winter coat on.

On a good note, I have cut down to less than a half a pack a day.

On a bad note, I swear a whole lot.

You’d think that having been a basement-dwelling troll for as long as I have, I’d be used to being colder than most. I am not. I still load up my bed with a down comforter, at least four other blankets, plus the aforementioned electric blanket, and surround myself with a down body pillow and about six other pillows for warmth. There are also usually at least three cats on the bed. I am still cold.

I didn’t use to be this way. In my tough-skinned youth, I used to forego wearing a coat. I used to sneer at wimpy tourists who would visit Chicago and complain about the harsh winters. I used to laugh at ice storms. If you can’t take the snow, I thought, then move somewhere wussy like California. Fucking babies.

I shoveled snow in a t-shirt and mittens, and I thought I was Bad Ass.

I am no longer Bad Ass. I am Weak Ass. I am old and frail and without robust blood. I buckle under the strong wind. I cringe at the thought of the impending snow. I think about chipping ice off of the driveway in January (the job will be mine, as the stepdad’s shoulders are shot to shit) and a shiver runs up my spine.

Wussy California is looking miiiighty good right about now.

I used to relentlessly make fun of my ex-fiancee for watching the Weather Channel. I thought, come on. It was like watching paint dry.

Now I get it completely.

I want to be ready. I want to be informed. I want to know what the hell is coming next. I watch that shit almost every day.

God help me. I have become one of Those People.

It’s the cold, you see. It’s gotten to my brain.

Happy Thursday.