Category Archives: humor

My Guy’s Grocery Games*

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I stared at the list. My mission: To see if anything was missing. My challenge: Deciphering what was already on the list.

“You can’t buy Google at the grocery, and even if you could we couldn’t afford it,” I said. “And what is this? Yom? Is it a Pennsylvania Dutch expression for yam?”

It was clear what was missing: legible writing.(1) I won’t say Dan’s writing is bad, but it does look like he could be a recent graduate of either a kindergarten or a medical school. Sometimes I think he channels a spirit who writes in Farsi.

“Google” turned out to be “goodie,” which is shorthand for anything on the quick sale bake table.(2)

“Yom” was really “UPM,” which is shorthand for “useless people meals.” These are frozen meals that we can nuke when both of us are too useless to do real cooking.(3) Dan buys whatever ones are on sale, so UPMs are also meal surprises, sort of like tomato surprises, only in a bag or a paper tray instead of a tomato. I always cross my fingers and hope for Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese, but it’s usually On-Cor salisbury steak(4) or the frozen burritos that impoverished college students subsist on.

After we settled on a revised list, I made the mistake of saying, “Try to keep it under $75.” Dan burst into hysterical laughter.

“You’re mocking me. I can tell,” I said, glaring. “I can tell by the mocking.”(5)

“Honey, everything on the list so far adds up to way more than $75.”

“I know. It’s a ritual phrase. I have to say it. Just like when you come back with $200 worth of groceries, you have to say, ‘OK, what do you want me to take back?'”

————–

On occasion I make the shopping trek with Dan,(6) which you would think would cut down on the cost, but doesn’t. We divide up the list. One of us starts at the back of the store and the other at the front. We keep each other posted with our cell phones. We meet somewhere near the middle, usually by the beer and wine, where we linger for a time in happy contemplation.

It’s not the stupidest shopping system ever.(7) We used to divide up the aisles into evens and odds, until we realized that meant both of us would have to navigate the entire length of the store, which is gargantuan, there and back again. The frozen food alone takes up four aisles and the pet food, two.

————–

Once our cart is as loaded as we will be later, it’s time to have fun with the cashiers. Once I bought an eggplant. The cashier held it up, pointed at it, and asked, “What is this?”

“It’s an eggplant,” I said. She rang it up.

I turned to Dan. “She believed me!” I exclaimed. “I could have told her anything! I could have said it was an avocado or a rutabaga or something really cheap!”(8)

I close my eyes when the total comes up and hand over a check for the automatic printing machine. I hope Dan makes sure the totals match, but by this time I am in complete denial. I keep muttering, “$75. Come on, $75.” It’s never $75, even if we only popped in for milk and bread.

I wonder if Guy Fieri and his wife have this much fun at the grocery?

—————-

*Guy Fieri has a TV game show on the Food Network called “Guy’s Grocery Games.” People run around in a supermarket and then cook. Guy is evil and springs surprises on them. He’s not as evil as Alton Brown on “Cutthroat Kitchen,” but entertaining nonetheless.
(1) Also fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and toilet paper.
(2) I’ve asked Dan to buy only one goodie at a time, and that only once or twice a month. This time he came home with scones, sticky cinnamon rolls, and a whole carrot cake. He said he had to fight an old lady for the cake.
(3) This happens lots. We also have Useless People tableware, which I’m sure you’ll guess is not made from any kind of ceramic or metal or glass.
(4) Which I bet really pisses off the people of Salisbury.
(5) My other possible response is, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” Bonus points for getting that reference.
(6) I have a bad back, so I get to use one of the store’s scooters with the basket on the front. They don’t hold much, but they’re as much fun as a go-kart or maybe a bumper car. They zoom along and have a really annoying “audible signal” for backing up. Some day I shall achieve my goal of knocking over a display of canned chunky soup and a heap of cantaloupes, then escaping, merrily beeping in reverse, savoring the yelps of people fearing for their toes and the plaintive announcements of “Cleanup on aisle six. And twelve. And four.” (I would circle back for more canned goods.)
(7) The stupidest shopping system ever is the one my sister uses. She purchases items in the order they appear on her shopping list (which is not written with the contents of the aisles in mind). Her path through the store is reminiscent of a drunken chicken on a scavenger hunt for a magic bean somewhere in the barnyard. Of course I would never really make that comparison about my sister. She doesn’t drink.
(8) Young clerks are fun too. Once in a drugstore I asked, “If I were talcum powder, where would I be?” and received a blank stare. “I don’t know what that is. What’s it used for?” the clerk asked. I thought about telling her, “I put it under my boobs when I sweat and get heat rash” (i.e., the truth). But I restrained myself and said, “You know? Like Johnson’s baby powder.”

The Pajama Game (Without Doris Day)

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I’ve never been one for frilly lingerie. Lace itches. Rayon makes me break out. Satin spots if you drool. Cat claws make pulls in silk. And I don’t really see the point in nightwear that you put on with the intention of ripping off moments later.

Let me tell you about flannel.(1) Flannel is my friend. When I was in my late teens, my mother found a pattern for a nightgown that I just adored. Very simple. It covered everything, right down to the ground. It was perfect.

I asked her to make me one in every color of flannel she could find. Pale solid yellow. Blue and red paisley. Camouflage. My father wanted to know if I would like to buy some more fashionable pajamas before I went off to the college dorms. To his everlasting amusement, I replied, “I’ve got my flannel nightgowns.”(2)

I’ve gone through phases in nightwear – au naturel to undies and a t-shirt and now to real, authentic things one is supposed to sleep in.

In the winter this means I’m back to my old favorite flannel – not floor-length nightgowns this time, but “Sheldon pajamas.”(3) Two-piece pajama sets of plaid flannel. Although Sheldon would freak out. I don’t have the matching robe and slippers for each set and I sometimes mismatch tops and bottoms. Shopping tip: Men’s pjs usually cost less than women’s, so I guess technically you could say I cross-dress between the sheets. Not that anyone ever has.

But spring is here (though you wouldn’t know it to look out the windows), so away with the Sheldon flannels and back to the stores for nightshirts. I don’t want ones with risqué sayings(4) or Pokemon characters or ones that look like hospital johnnies, only with a backside(5). This limits my choices.

Once again I head to the men’s department to find XXXL Big & Tall men’s t-shirts. Now I have Captain America and Batman(6) nightshirts, and this new favorite:

Kittens...in...space!
Kittens…in…space!

I also have a CPAP mask, a neat accessory for this nightshirt at least, because it makes my breathing sound like Darth Vader. I am a veritable bedtime fashionista.

Except I sleep with my mouth open, which makes me drool. And one of my medications also makes me drool. A lot.

Good thing I’m not sleeping with anyone I’m trying to impress.

(1) Super bonus points if you get this reference.
(2) Whenever he told this story – and it was often – he delivered the final line in a drawn-out Beverly Hillbillies-style drawl. It peeved me, but I never said so. Until now.
(3) A TBBT reference, as my initial-happy friends would put it.
(4) I was permanently scarred as a young teen when my mother bought me Garfield underpants that said “I feel frisky.” I was mortally afraid I’d get hit by a bus and the ER personnel would have a field day.
(5) Unless it’s made of that soft, brushed cotton that feels like the spring version of flannel. Okay, I bought one. It even has a pocket, if very inconveniently placed.
(6) Why are comic book characters acceptable, but not Pokemon or, say, Care Bears? I actually like Batman and Captain America and am not embarrassed to be seen in them. By my husband, I mean. And anyone who looks in my study window, I guess. Yes, I spend 90 percent of my life in pajamas. That’s the joy of working at home. The pajamas, not the peepers.

What Were They Thinking? (Toilet Edition)

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I keep having these dreams. I understand they’re pretty common.(1) In them, I can never find a bathroom. If I do find one it’s unusable – disgustingly filthy, or with no doors or paper, or in the middle of a men’s locker room, or always in the next hall over, or a bucket, or just a circular pipe with no toilet on top of it.

I wake up thinking I’m going to wet the bed. (I haven’t. Yet.)

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered a fair number of potty nightmares in real life too.

Ohio’s Rest Stops
Ohio likes to think of itself as a northern sort of midwestern state – even fought for the Union in the Civil War.(2) But they were tragically far behind in embracing modern (non-outhouse) technology. They didn’t even require flush toilets and running water, not to mention cleanliness and sanitation until 1989. Literally. Legally.(3)

Think about it. From the time I was able to use the grown-up toilet until I was over 30, Ohio was not legally required to provide me with anything other than a latrine. Which often attract bees. Which I am phobic about.

Because of my superior bladder control, I was able to “hold it till we get to Grandma’s.”

Pay Toilets
Yes, children, you used to have to pay to piss.(4) At some point, someone realized this was a discriminatory practice and decided there must be a stall for those without pocket change. These were invariably the stuff of my nightmares.(5)

In fact, I include pay toilets in this stall-of-infamy recital so I can include a terrible joke. What is a synonym for a pay toilet? Johnny Cash.(6) I refuse to include the graffiti “poem,” because everyone knows it already. You don’t? Go ask your crazy aunt.

Kiddie Toilets for Grown-ups
A recent “innovation” I’ve noticed is for all public toilets to be the size of those in elementary schools. Is it a least-common-denominator thing?(7) A water-conserving measure? Purchases from all the schools that are closing? I don’t know.

What I do know is that for a person with aging knees (me), they are damnably hard to get up from. They make me think I am trapped in a verse of “Seven Old Ladies Were Locked in the Lavatory.”(8)

Which brings to the other toilet terror:

Squat Toilets
I was traveling in Croatia and stopped in Istria to see a Roman ruin. Feeling the call of nature, I asked for the facilities. When I found them, I found a stall with a hole in the ground. There was a helpful diagram of where to place your feet.

I used it of course. I had no choice by that point.(9)

And I realize that I’m being totally a first-world, ethnocentric, pampered, ugly-American tourist-type, and that millions of people every day (several times a day, really) use squat toilets and are grateful that they have them, as there are those who cannot avail themselves of even that luxury.

But what I want to know is:

Where do their grannies go?

When I was able to travel I was also able to stand up from a squatting position, but now it would take two healthy young lads to hoist me to the vertical. I’m fairly sure such restroom attendants are not available everywhere. I doubt even a handicapped-access bar would help me now. And I’m not even totally old and decrepit. If I make it to 90, I’ll be in real trouble.

Perhaps after years of practice, squatting grannies have exceptionally strong and supple knee joints. Or some secret knee-rejuvenating treatment that they are saving for themselves and their posterity.(10)

In the words of one of the most awful commercials for ass-wipe today, how in the hell can they “enjoy the go”? I can’t even enjoy dreaming anymore.

(1) I wish the hot-n-juicy variety of dreams were more common, but, sadly, they aren’t.
(2) The first one, I mean.
(3) Here’s the statute: The director of transportation shall develop and implement a program for improving the roadside rest area system along highways of the interstate system and the primary system. Each sanitary facility in the roadside rest area system on the interstate system and at selected locations on the primary system that is upgraded shall have potable water, water flush toilets, and wash basins equipped with running water for the use of the traveling public… Effective Date: 07-01-1989 (Emphasis added.)
(4) Or anything else.
(5) See above.
(6) My apologies to Mr. Cash and all his relatives and friends. I respect and admire him a lot. But that’s how the joke really goes.
(7) Which I don’t remember addressing until later in school.
(8) This was a favorite at Girl Scout camp. In addition to being scatological, it’s sexist and ageist, which would have probably been why we liked it, if any of those things other than scatology were a thing yet. Now there’s a stop-motion animated video. Not kidding. See for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQx1OcIlFqE
(9) Though I did have perhaps my only bout ever of penis envy.
(10) Sorry. Couldn’t help it.

The Worst Sex-Ed Book. Ever.

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Dr. Seuss is my all-time favorite author of children’s rhyming books. He did not write a sex education book.(1)

Shel Silverstein took over from Seuss as my favorite children’s poet. He did not write a sex-ed book either.(2)

IMHO, no one has equaled those two in writing rhyming books for children, though many have tried. Lord, how they’ve tried. And for the most part, failed miserably.

I once edited a magazine called Early Childhood News, which was intended for an audience of child care center owners, directors, and possibly staff. It was occasionally entertaining.(3) I got a lot of children’s books to review.(4)

Which is where the sex-ed and the poetry come in.(5)

One day an amazing book came across my desk. It was titled How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother, which should have been my first clue.

The book was obviously self-published. To say that it lacked the services of a professional editor and a professional illustrator would be a charming understatement.

The text was written (and illustrated) by a real medical doctor, so I guess that was one up on Dr. Seuss, but it didn’t help. The main characters were – I’m not kidding – Stanley Sperm and Essie Egg.

One memorable illustration(6) showed Stanley and Essie sitting on a bench, courting, I suppose. As I recall Essie had long eyelashes and Stanley had either a top hat or a bow tie. Maybe both. Behind them was the gate to a park, with a sign identifying the location as “Cervix.”

You can probably tell from the bow tie and the park bench that scientific accuracy was not the author’s primary concern. Also, Essie and Stanley were the same size.(7)

And now we get to the poetry. Here’s a sample. The author was attempting to tell where Stanley Sperm had lived, before he met the coy and comely Miss Essie. Somewhat confusingly, it seemed that Stanley had come from one or the other of two towns:

The towns are both named “Testicle”
and they look like two round eggs.
They’re not located on a map,
but between your Daddy’s legs.(8)

Do I have to say I did not review the book? (I thought not.)

I kept it for a time, though, to show disbelieving friends. And possibly as the basis for a party game, with each person reading aloud from it until exploding with laughter, when it would be passed on to the next reader.(9)

Of course, given the sex-ed books currently used in schools, there may be other texts out there that are just as bad, or at least as inaccurate. But for sheer unintentional awfulness, How Dad and Mother Made Your Brother has won its place in the annals of scary books that will make kids never want to have sex. Ever. That being the point of most sex education in schools anyway, as far as I can tell.

(1) That we know of. He did write advertising, so who really knows where he drew the line?
(2) Though he certainly could have. He’s the author/artist of Different Dances and the songwriter of “Don’t Give a Dose to the One You Love Most.”
(3) The ad sales department once insisted I add a column about food, as they desperately wanted to attract Lunchables as a client. Yeah, right. Lunchables. For child care centers. I had no choice in the matter, except for the title of the column, which I made as repulsive as possible – “Food Digest.” Well, it amused me, anyway, even if no one else noticed.
(4) Also, sometimes companies sent me samples of toys they hoped I would promote in the magazine. Not sex toys, though. I also received, for some reason, an anti-circumcision newsletter. I used to count the number of times the word “foreskin” appeared in it, just to look busy.
(5) You were starting to wonder, weren’t you? Go on, admit it.
(6) I’ve been told that only shock treatment will erase it from my memory.
(7) Reminder: The author went to medical school and, presumably, graduated.
(8) I hope that’s enough of a sample, since it is the only verse I memorized. I do recall that the conception scene would have been a real production number, had the book ever made the transition to film.
(9) With bonus points awarded for imitating the voice of Bullwinkle the Moose or possibly Daffy Duck.

The Day I Brought Bullets to School

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I grew up in a house surrounded by guns and bullets.1 After we moved to Ohio, squirrels were no longer on the menu, but in my youth, my Kentucky uncles would shoot squirrels and rabbits and the occasional woodchuck. So I had tasted all of those, usually fried in lard by my maiden aunt, who was for some reason called “Pete,” rather than “Edna Mae,” which was her real name.2

So steeped in gun culture was my family that my father gave my mother a single-shot rifle, which was nicknamed “Grandma,” for their first anniversary. Both of them later became certified rifle and pistol instructors. At age 12 my sister and I both received .22 rifles. We were a well-regulated little militia – three generations worth, if you count “Grandma.”

As if guns weren’t enough of a hobby, Dad also had a thing for bullets. And when I say “thing,” I mean a reloading tool. He would collect spent .38 cartridges (known as “brass”) from the rifle range. He would then put them on a machine operated by a lever that would, depending on the setting, straighten out the cartridges, seat a primer in the bottom, add the appropriate amount of gunpowder, and grease and seat a bullet,3 which was then ready to repeat its journey and reincarnate as empty brass. It was an early form of recycling that for some reason environmentalists never talked about.

Dad also had a hand tool that would reload a single bullet. It looked something like a Bedazzler, only more butch and greasier.

As I entered my teen years, I became more reluctant to spend my Saturdays on the father-daughter bonding experience of going to the rifle range. The smell of cordite in the morning was no longer so alluring. Guns were his hobby, and I was finding my own. Admittedly, crossword puzzles and Star Trek reruns would be less useful than target shooting after the zombie apocalypse, but the prematurely resurrected were not yet on the horizon.

When I was solidly ensconced in my teens and encountered high school, one of the educational exercises they inflicted on us was doing demonstration or “how-to” speeches in front of our English classes. It was a more sophisticated version of show-and-tell, with fewer goldfish. I don’t remember any of the other demonstrations, but mine was reloading bullets. It did nothing to lessen my reputation for oddity.

I took the hand reloading hand tool, an empty cartridge, a spent primer, and powder. I Bedazzled my way through all the steps, happy in the knowledge that, though I gave an entirely valid how-to demonstration, it would be utterly useless to the class.4

It’s worthwhile noting that I did not bring actual gunpowder to school. Instead I substituted iced tea powder.5

It got me an A. These days it would get me handcuffed and tasered.

1. The house was not surrounded by commandos with guns and ammo. The guns and bullets were in the house.
2. She got riled up if anyone called her Edna Mae. Admittedly, that still doesn’t explain the Pete. It caused some confusion when a neighborhood friend went visiting with us and in telling her mother about it, casually mentioned, “I slept with Pete.” She then had to explain (and quickly), “Oh, mother, Pete’s a girl!”
3. He made the bullets himself, too. He had a big chunk of lead, and he would melt it down and pour it into molds. (My mother made him do this outside, which was a Good Thing, because of the fumes and our tender, growing brains.) For those bullet-techies out there, what my Dad made were “wad-cutters,” a flat-nosed bullet used for target shooting. He sometimes substituted wax for lead and made lighter loads for starter pistols.
4. Maybe some of them are Doomsday Preppers now and wish they’d paid attention.
5. Which is ironic, considering how much I loathe the Tea Party and open-carry enthusiasts.

I Was a Teenage Ninja

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Well, no I wasn’t. I wasn’t a mutant, either. When I was a teenager, no one in America had heard of ninjas.(1) At that point, they hadn’t even heard of Ninja Turtles.(2)

But let’s back this train up. It all started (for me, not the ninjas) in Philadelphia (for the ninjas, it started in Japan), and ironically, because of trains. I was staying in Hatfield and wanted to visit some friends across town.

“I don’t think you should do that,” said my then-fiancé (now-husband). “You have to change trains. And you have to walk through a scary, dark, underground tunnel in a bad section of town, at night, to get to the other train.”

Needless to say(3), I stuck out my lower lip so far you could stand on it; crossed my arms in front of me like the Great Wall of China,; and glared my special, patented, death-to-you glare. Dan, who is adept at reading body language, correctly interpreted this as, “You can’t tell me what scary, dark, underground tunnels I can or can’t walk through.”

I was going to explain that several times I had spent the night in the Cleveland bus terminal (midnight to six) and survived, but I would have had to admit that I sat in the roped-off area for women and children only(4), so it wasn’t all that scary and I wasn’t all that brave.

Anyway, not being an idiot, I postponed the visit, and made a solemn oath that as soon as I got home, I was going to take a self-defense class, which is what you did back then instead of simply packing heat, which self-defense classes at the time did not recommend.

I checked out the offerings in the local adult education catalog from our local school district. One of the classes listed was Ninjutsu Self-Defense. Hm. Interesting. It was not a “sport” martial art and didn’t require a gi, so I signed up. The instructor was Stephen K. Hayes.(5)

After six weeks of learning various kinds of punching and kicking, plus falling and rolling, I decided to continue training. The only problem was, there was no follow-up course. What there was, was an informal training group that met weekly behind an apartment complex and next to a cemetery.(6) (Later the group became a more formal organization and met in a rented space underneath a strip mall. Very stealthy.) We were early adopters of the butch camo look, with “tiger-stripe” (Vietnam jungle) camo being considered the sexiest variety.(7)

As self-defense, ninjutsu was very practical. It also made a lot more sense to me than the usual women’s self-defense advice and tips so prevalent then (and perhaps even now). You know the kind: Poke your attacker in the eyes. Carry your keys protruding between your fingers for use as a weapon. Go for the gonads. Well. The eye-poke and car keys will ensure a pissed-off attacker and guys expect you to target their junk, so they automatically defend against that. And they don’t have to take classes about protecting the ol’ gonies.

No, the concept was “body weight in motion.” I can easily describe this philosophy. The human knee is a delicate structure that does not willingly go in very many directions. Drop 100+ pounds of anything – sack of potatoes, log, female human – on it in one of those non-standard directions, and the knee will no longer function well. You have not merely a pissed-off attacker, but one that probably cannot limp as fast as you can run screaming for help. Plus, you can make it look like you just slipped and fell on him, which is a good thing if it ever goes to court.(8)

Every summer there was a camp, which was nothing like what they air now on TV “reality” shows. We learned interesting Japanese weapons, such as the bo, hanbo, tanto, shuriken(9), kusari fundo, and (my favorite) the kyoketsu shogei. None of which I tend to carry around, but all of which use principles transferable to modern, everyday items like mops and steak knives and even large-caliber dog leashes. We also learned pressure points and other painful techniques, which are fun, and also work fine against a larger attacker. One year at camp I had the pleasure of watching Masaaki Hatsumi, the little, old Grandmaster, easily maneuver an assistant sensei into the ground and feed him grass while apologizing profusely but insincerely.

Yes, we learned lots of useful things. For me, the most practical technique proved to be editing the club newsletter. It was more of a 16-page non-glossy magazine, and when I applied for my first real editing job, it was prominent among the samples of my work I had to show.

I got the job. And I didn’t even have to feed the interviewer grass.

Now I edit like a ninja. I wield my sword of strikethrough and the red font trails across the screen like pooling blood. I leave sliced paragraphs in my wake, still alive and considerably shorter.

(1) Unless they read James Bond novels, but everyone just went to the movies. Well, not everyone. I didn’t. So I don’t know whether the ninjas played any part in the movies. But they were mentioned in one of the books, which was really my point.
(2) An artist friend of mine said, “You mean children are going to hear the names Donatello and Michelangelo, and think they’re turtles?!!!?”
(3) But I’m going to anyway.
(4) Really.
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_K._Hayes
(6) And you can bet there were many jokes made about that.
(7) See http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1678959 for an example. No, I don’t know why an outfit called spoonflower sells camo. Other varieties of camo include woodland (summer or fall), which looks really stupid if you wear it in the desert, which two characters in a movie once did, desert camo, and international orange camo, which sounds really stupid but is actually the best for hunters of color-blind animals like elephants and deer.
(8) It most likely won’t.
(9) Which are nothing like you see in the movies. You cannot kill someone with a shrunken to the forehead (though my husband did once break a garage window with one). They are more for distraction, or, if they’re good and rusty, able to cause death by tetanus, at least back when they were invented and tetanus vaccine wasn’t.

The Great Linguini Divot

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Dan is not a doctor.(1) But once he did take a scalpel to my tender flesh and excise a horror I had lived with for years.

Here’s how it happened: I had a recurring cyst that would appear on my torso from time to time, like a giant zit that just wandered off to be alone. Swollen, bright red, tight skin, pain – the whole works. Usually it went away after a few days.(2)

But it always came back. The timing was random, but the zit was not.

A friend saw it when we were changing clothes to go out. She didn’t take it seriously, though, so I told her that I had been to the doctor, who diagnosed it as “polymammia,” which meant I was growing a third breast.(3) It fooled her for a moment. But just a moment. A brief one.

Eventually, it bothered me enough to really see a doctor. He never said a word about “polymammia,”(4) but called it a recurring cyst. “Come back in a couple of days and I’ll lance it,” he said.

So I did. He looked at it and poked at it with a (gloved) finger and said, “It’s not ready yet.”

“You mean it’s not ripe?” I said. “Couldn’t you at least try to lance it? It hurts a lot.”

He allowed as how he could try. And did. And found a pocket of pus lurking underneath. “Wow! That must have hurt!” he said.

I gave him the sideways squint.

“Not that I didn’t believe you,” he stammered. Then he changed the subject. “Let’s put a drain in there.”

Here’s where the linguini enters the story.(5)

I had never had anything on or in my body drained before, so I thought maybe he would draw out the gunk with a hypodermic or at least take a tiny rubber hose and stick it into the cyst so the pus would just run out.

But no. It turns out a “drain” is an object that looks like a piece of knit linguini. He stuffed it in there and bandaged it and it healed nicely (after bleeding through the bandage and my shirt for a while).

Some time later, though, I noticed a slightly raised black dot, about the size of the roller from a roller ball pen, where the cyst used to be. Oh great, I thought. I’ve exchanged a wandering zit for a wandering blackhead.

The darned thing itched at times. It looked like I could squeeze it like the blackhead it resembled, or if I could get my fingernails under it, it would pop right out. I never could manage it, though, perhaps because I bite my fingernails off and spit them across the room as soon as they grow an eighth of an inch.(6)

Here’s where my husband and the scalpel come in. To be truthful, it wasn’t a scalpel. It was an Exacto knife. He sterilized it with flame and alcohol, and swabbed all around the blackhead with more alcohol. Then, since we were both just a wee bit nervous, we both applied even more alcohol(7). Internally.

Wielding the Exacto with surprising delicacy, given the size of his bear-like paws, Dan cut around the blackhead and began to lift it out.

It kept coming. This alarmed us both.

When the Thing was finally extracted, it proved to be several inches of drain, wadded up and solid. The doctor had neglected to remove all of it, the blood had dried and turned it black(8), and there it had resided in my torso for several years.

We goggled at it for a moment, then applied more alcohol(9), and slapped a Band-aid on it. I never heard from it again.(10)

Dan had thought that the skin would heal over smoothly, without a trace. And it did. Mostly. There was no scar, just a teeny little roller-ball-pen-ball-sized depression where first the cyst, then the linguini had been. A linguini divot, if you will.

Which I have to this day. Viewings by appointment only.

(1) Nor does he play one on TV. He has been a medical orderly, back when that job existed. Now he’s just disorderly.
(2) Or wandered off again to someplace or someone else where it didn’t bother me.
(3) I don’t think there is a medical term for growing a third breast. If there isn’t, I would like to suggest “polymammia.”
(4) Which, now that I think about it is a Good Thing. I would have had to throw out all my bras and get new ones custom-made. I assume that’s expensive. Plus I’d probably have to send a picture of the third breast* to the manufacturer and it would be leaked to the Internet, go viral, and I could never be on the Supreme Court.
*I was once presented a serving of shepherd’s pie that had three scoops of mashed potato on top. Guess what it looked like.**
**Three breasts, that’s what. Stay with me here, people.
(5) You were wondering, weren’t you? I can tell.
(6) I grew them out exactly once, for my wedding. The salon used a nail color called “Pepperoni,” which was probably the only time they used it for a wedding manicure.
(7) Rum.
(8) Cooking tip: If your linguini turns hard and black, it’s overdone.
(9) Both kinds.
(10) For all I know, Dan may have kept it. He always wants the scans from our colonoscopies and the time they took pictures inside my bladder. He wanted to keep his own appendix, but they wouldn’t let him. Unless it’s that thing in the back of the freezer. I don’t really want to know.

Butt Check

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Ah! Remember the good old days when you were just potty-trained and as you marched out of the bathroom, having proudly done your duty, your mother was waiting to tell you to pull down your pants and prepare for butt inspection?

Me neither.

But apparently that’s the way it is with bears. God forbid that a young bear-child should have shreds of toilet paper clinging to its ass.(1)

At first the commercials were cute – using the old rhetorical question about bears and their excretory functions.(2) Ha ha. Very amusing.

But now they’ve gone too far. The you-don’t-have-to-use-a-lot-of-paper commercial was OK. Instructive in its way, and a lesson every young bear needs to learn. But enough is enough. We don’t need to know about bear butt checks.(3)

And we especially don’t need to know about bears and SKID MARKS. That’s right, the next commercial in the series was about how this miracle toilet tissue could prevent skid marks in one’s underwear.(4)

Never mind that bears do not generally wear pants and have never been depicted in the commercials wearing pants. Without pants, how can they have underpants? And without underpants, how can they have skid marks?

Now we’re in the realm of not just butt checks, but underwear inspection. I mean, ick. Think about it, bear skid marks would be HUGE.(5)

Of course that’s not the only disturbing commercial out there. My husband hates the ones in which sentient cereal squares eat other sentient cereal squares. Maybe that’s just him. We both hate the one where the guy has been in an auto accident and his mother appears, waiting on the phone with the insurance company. He says, “You’re not helping.” Hey, dipwad, at least she’s trying, instead of standing there making up dopey magic jingles. And she’s your mother – show some respect!

At this point I could go into a rant about how advertising agencies are incapable of making commercials without making someone look idiotic and helpless. It used to be women who were stupid and needed to be rescued by the über-masculine Mr. Clean. Then men got to be incompetent, with women bailing them out from assorted domestic dilemmas. Now the trend is for all adults to be complete imbeciles with children who must save them from technological and other disasters.(6) Even talking babies with investment advice. As if someone who hasn’t even graduated to skid-mark-able underpants should be trusted with our financial future!

But you can certainly fill in the blanks with your own least favorite commercials.

Just don’t get me started on how commercials try to deceive us, and often succeed.(7) We’ll be here all night, instead of drifting off to sleep with visions of bear asses, uh, dancing in our heads.(8)

(1) Obviously, bears don’t have to pull down their pants. That would be ridiculous.

(2) Oh, come on. You know the one I mean.

(3) You have no idea how hard it’s been writing this without dipping into the possibilities of puns involving bear/bare and but/butt. And duty/doody, for that matter. Now that I think about it, I could have probably worked “cheeky” in there somewhere.

(4) We all know what we’re talking about, right? We don’t? How shall I put this delicately? Streaks made by a substance of a certain dark color.

(5) Or don’t think about it. You’ll be happier. Except now that I’ve mentioned it, you’re thinking about it RIGHT NOW, aren’t you? See how I did that? Ah, the power of authorship. Tee-hee.

(6) Though not skid marks. Yet.

(7) You know what “virtually painless” means? NOT PAINLESS!

(8) You’re welcome.

Light Crumbs and Muffin Bones

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A woman told a joke and I collapsed in hysterics before she even got to the punchline. Here’s the set-up:

Why did the man have a hundred-dollar bill tattooed on his wing-wing?

That’s when I lost it.(1)

I found out later that she called a woman’s genitals her “tutu.” Which no doubt confused her kids the first time they saw a ballet.

Almost every family, and many politicians and pundits, have trouble calling things by their right names. So we have “lady parts” and “va-jay-jays” and “junk.” Even “uterus” was too shocking for the Florida State Legislature, which reprimanded a member for letting such a word fall on delicate ears, “particularly [those of] the young pages and messengers who are seated in the chamber during debates.”(2)

But every family also has unique words and phrases that enter their vocabulary and stay there, though not for fear of giving offense. They’re just things that no outsider understands.

Some of these terms are created by children and have no equivalent in adult language. One little girl said she wanted an Easter hat with a “go-down.” “You’ll have to show me one,” her mother said. Turns out a go-down was a ribbon that dangled down the back.

Another child invented “move-down” for that moment during a meal when you’re not completely full but need your stomach contents to settle a bit. My husband and I have adopted that one. It’s just so darn useful. “Are you through?” “No, just having a move-down.”

Here’s a good example of one of our neologisms(3): Light crumbs. Dan works nights and hates to leave lights on because of the power bills. I, on the other hand, can’t find my way upstairs without light. I can’t even get from the sofa to the switch by the stairs. If I get up the stairs, I can’t make it to the switch in the bathroom. If I get that far, I can’t make it to my bedside lamp. I have balance problems and walking in the dark makes me dizzy. Plus we have a cat whose nickname is “Mr. Underfoot.”

So Dan leaves a trail of light crumbs for me to follow like a vision-impaired Hansel and/or Gretel. Instead of turning them on as I reach them, I turn them off as I pass them. It’s less doofy than hanging a flashlight around my neck, more agreeable than sending the power company more than absolutely necessary, and easier on Garcia’s tail. Win, win, win.

Many of our personal vocabulary items have to do with food. Here are a few, with definitions.

Muffin bones. When you eat ribs, you usually have a side plate for the bones. When my husband was doing the low-carb thing, he wouldn’t eat pizza crusts. He would put them aside, and they became pizza bones. Similarly, the empty, sticky, crumby fluted paper cups that hold muffins are muffin bones.

Tuna juice. No, we don’t put fish through a juicer.(4) Tuna juice is the water that tuna packed in water is packed in. Cats love it, either straight up or mixed with their regular food.

Not-flan. I had a recipe for a sweet baked good involving pastry crust, eggs, cream cheese, sugar, and optional fruit topping. My husband kept calling it “flan.” I told him that wasn’t the thing’s name. “What is it then?” he demanded. I was stumped. “Well, not flan!” I replied. Ever since that has been our name for it. Later, after I thought it over, “Way-Too-Big Cheese Danish” would have been more accurate. But by then it was too late.(5)

Cat-related activities are good sources for invented words too. Here are some of ours:

Cat fit. Also known as “the Crazy Hour,” this is when cats race around the house for no apparent reason, as if the devil himself were after them.(6)

Bag mice. Those things that make the rustling noise inside either paper or plastic, that cats must protect their owners from. I was pleased to learn that this phenomenon must be universal, as once in Dubrovnik, a black catten(7) detected bag mice in our souvenir bag. (It’s also possible that it just wanted to sneak into the U.S.)

Kitty burrito. Not a food item, but what you must make in order to give a cat pills, fluids, eye drops, or other indignities. Swaddling in a towel is traditional, but we find that dropping the cat in a pillowcase and then doing the burrito folds makes it harder for the patient to squirm loose.

I have not trademarked or copyrighted any of these words or phrases. Feel free to use them if you wish. And if you’d like to share some of your most useful invented vocabulary items with readers of this blog, please do. But please, no euphemisms or slang terms for penis and vagina. We already have way too many of those.

(1) If you are the one person in the world who’s never heard it, the punchline is: Because he heard how women love to blow money.

(2) Pages and messengers range in age from 12-18. I envision an 18-year-old asking, “Mommy, what’s a uterus?”

(3) Look it up.

(4) Or cook them in the dishwasher, which apparently is a thing.

(5) This was also not during Dan’s low-carb phase.

(6) Once Maggie got her back paw tangled in a plastic shopping bag, got scared, and was chased up the stairs by a recently purchased videotape of An American in Paris, which is not exactly the devil, but pretty alarming anyway. Because no matter how fast you run, it’s still always Right There Behind You.

(7) Not a kitten, but not full-grown; a teen-ager.

Moonshine Fantasy

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Watching Chopped on Food Network, I noticed that all the baskets contained some kind of moonshine and that the guest judge was from Outback Steakhouse.

Math may not have been my best subject, but I can put one and one together and usually come within spitting distance of two or thereabouts. I said to myself, “Self, I bet Outback is having some kind of moonshine promotion.”

I was right. Within a couple of days I began seeing the commercials. I have also seen “moonshine” for sale in the liquor stores. This is just wrong. The wrongness of it rattled around in my brain and caused this vision.

Me [in Outback Steakhouse]: Any specials today?

Server [perkily]: Why, yes! We’re featuring our new Moonshine Entrees!

Me: Tell me about them.

Server [still perky]: Each of our superb meats has been infused with the authentic flavor of moonshine!

Me: You mean it tastes like airplane glue and smells like kerosene?

Server [puzzled]: Why, no! It’s a sweet rich flavor that enhances all our dishes.

Me: So where do you get your moonshine?

Server [resuming perkiness]: It comes from our warehouse on the weekly truck so you now that every batch is fresh!

Me: Yeah, that’s about how long my uncle used to age his. But he kept it under the corn crib instead of in a warehouse.

Server [still trying]: We make sure the quality is consistent and always imparts that special moonshine kick!

Me [impressed]: So you know that it always causes the jake-leg wobbles and the blind staggers?

Server [beginning to fold]: Really, I don’t think…

Me: Yeah, that’s the other good thing about moonshine. After your kidneys shut down, it goes to your head and you can’t think.

Server [losing it]: Perhaps you should see the manager.

Me: If I can still see her, it ain’t the best moonshine.

Server [nearing tears]: It’s really nothing like that!

Me: Then you’re obviously not using my uncle’s recipe. It was a big hit at all the family reunions. He’d get plumb crazy and start firing off his single-shot rifle. Gives a person a sporting chance. Not like those AR-15s everyone has nowadays. Tell me, is this an open carry state?

Server flees, returning with the manager, who gives me a coupon for a free dinner. At the Olive Garden.

Of course, I wouldn’t really do any such thing. For one thing, it would be mean, and for another I can’t really afford to eat at Outback. And of course the dialogue probably wouldn’t go as I imagined. And I’d be thrown out on one of my ears.

But still…