Daily Diatribes

Do you think you’re busy? Really? Let me shame you. Let me hold myself up as a paragon of over-scheduledness and make you examine your own shallow, empty meaningless life and feel bad about yourself for getting eight hours of sleep every night and keeping a clean house. I lead two girl scout troops. I am a Venture Crew Advisor. I am co-room mother for the goddess’s classroom. I am the publicist for the arts board at the high school. I am the Service Unit Manager for the girl scouts. I am taking four graduate level courses. I work part-time. I have three children and a large, dirty house. Oh, and I’m a blogger; don’t forget the blogging!! I am woman….hear me roar….mostly in complaint about how over-scheduled I am!!!! I know you don’t feel sorry for me, but that’s fine. I pity myself enough for both of us!
This past weekend, I chaperoned the Venture Crew lock-in at camp. Although the forecast promised it would be sunny and mild, in reality, it was cold, dreary and drizzling. How does the weatherman stay employed, considering how often he gets the forecast wrong? I wish I could be that bad at my job and still pull in six figures. Anyway, we had an outdoor activity planned for the afternoon and it was wretched.
When we got back to the cabin, we built a fire in the wood-stove. Doesn’t that sound charming and rustic? I was absolutely enchanted and immediately began channeling my inner Laura Ingalls Wilder. If only I had had a sunbonnet, my happiness would have been complete. I had never seen a wood-stove work before and it was amazing to me. You open the little doors and shove in pieces of wood. The heat is conducted through the metal stovepipe and pretty soon it radiates out into the room. After our day outside, it felt wonderful. I pulled my chair up to the stove, opened my Kindle and began to read “David Copperfield”. (Yes, I realize the Kindle was anachronistic but I didn’t have the actual book with me…sorry!!!)
“Just wait,” said one of the dads, “pretty soon it’ll heat up this whole room!!” Ah, truer words were never spoken. After an hour, we were able to turn off the central heat in the room. Again I marveled at the cunning and cleverness of the stove. Things worked just fine in the old days; why do we think we can improve upon them? Another hour passed and we were all forced to shuck our sweatshirts and hang out in our short sleeves. Still, I marveled at the heat produced by the stove. So efficient, so reliable, so very, VERY capable of producing heat!! By bed time, it was approximately 217 degrees in the cabin and we were all sweating like construction workers in Florida.
When I say “all”, I mean myself, the seven teenagers and the two adult men crammed into the one room. All the teenagers were drinking Red Bull and doing Five Hour Energy Shots. They played a game called ‘pteradactyl’ which required them to shriek loudly like prehistoric reptiles. Woozy from the intense heat, I felt as if Dante had missed an entire level of hell. Can you think of anything MORE hellish than an overheated room full of teenagers strung out on caffeine and sugar and cawing like pteradactyls????

I drifted in and out of consciousness, as my core body temperature rose into the 120’s. The fire was burning brightly. The teenagers were cawing. The night wore on and they showed no signs of slowing. The moved from the pterodactyl game to a game with the cheerful title of “serial killer”. Doesn’t it sound like fun to be in the middle of the woods, in a boiling hot room, with a group of kids playing serial killer??? It was a card game and if the ‘killer’ winked at you, you had to die. So periodically, a body would thump to the floor, jolting me out of my stupor. It was HELL and it was not fun. I imagined Satan cavorting about the room gleefully, enjoying my torment.

I’ve always joked about the likelihood that I will end up in Hell. I’m not a very nice person. I gossip too much. I yell at referees during soccer games, comparing them unfavorably to Colonel Sanders and Osama bin laden. I curse at my children. I don’t recycle enough. I never tithe enough at church. I coughed at that Driver’s License worker. I figure I’m a shoo-in for Hell. Mind you, I’ll have plenty of friends there. Maybe we can be manacled to the same rocks and gossip about some of the lesser demons. “Can you BELIEVE what Bael is wearing today???? No self respecting demon would be caught in Hell wearing THOSE shoes!!!” or “I’m not questioning Satan’s judgment, but do you really think that constructing a new Chasm of Despair is the best use of our tax dollars?” (Because we know there will be taxes in Hell….that’s a given!!!)

Still, it’s one thing to imagine what Hell MIGHT be like and another thing altogether to find yourself in it and discover that it’s hot, murky and full of cawing teenagers and Red Bull. At 12:30, we turned out the lights. I lay in the dark, wrestling with the overwhelming urge to strip down to my underwear. I held back because not only would the sight of my stretch marks frighten the children, I figured it would also violate about 237 Boy Scout rules. So I stayed clothed, stretched out on top of the sleeping bag, and panted like a dog. The teenager next to me tossed and turned fretfully, mewling occasionally “it’s soooooo hot!!!” I wanted to throttle her and scream “YES WE KNOW!!!!” but refrained, again cognizant of those pesky BSA guidelines.

FINALLY Tom, our venerable Crew Leader, took action. He got up and opened several windows. And the doors. A small breeze blew in and Satan and his minions dissipated, overcome by the threat of coolness breaking up their Hell party. Surprisingly enough, despite the snores that soon filled the room, I was able to sleep. I think my body was exhausted from the intense heat, so I had no choice but to succumb. I think I managed to sleep six hours, which is not too shabby for a lock-in! At some point, the room finally got cool enough for the windows to be closed, but we never did turn the heat back on. It wasn’t necessary.

I won’t say I was refreshed when I got up in the morning, but at least I wasn’t comatose. Which was a good thing since I had a Brownie meeting later that day!! Right, so next time you want to complain about how BUSY you are, know I will be lurking around somewhere in your head, mocking you! I’ve got the market cornered on busy!! Ooops, gotta go, it’s prayer time!! Now that I’ve seen what Hell is actually like, I”m trying to work my way into Heaven!!

Monday morning, I made the fatal mistake of placing a one hundred dollar bill in my wallet. Normally you will not even find a one dollar bill in my wallet, let alone a bill of even higher currency. However, it was money we had gotten for Christmas and I was going to spend the money buying my goddess some new blue jeans, the old ones being too tight in the butt and torn at the knees. (Aside….can you tell I have been reading Dickens? My sentences are growing longer.)

Anyway, I call the placement of cash a fatal mistake because somehow the cash in my wallet triggered a chain of cosmic events which resulted in my wallet being stolen. I set out that bright morning to buy the jeans, but, in fact, never actually bought jeans because MA had soccer practice at 11:30 and so instead of buying jeans, we went to Krispy Kreme and bought donuts and then I took her to get her nails done, which, incidentally, was another fatal mistake. By the time her nails were dry, we had to rush home so she could change clothes, so I paid for the manicure, went straight to my car and drove home. At home, she went upstairs to change and get her soccer bag and I carried in a bag of dog food and fed the canines. I then drove her to soccer, she got out of the car and I drove straight home. Where I made the discovery that my wallet was missing.

At first I thought it was in the car. I searched the car thoroughly, overturning fast food bags and empty Diet Coke bottles. No wallet. I retraced my steps through the house; no wallet. I emptied all the dog food from its bin into another bin, just in case I had accidentally dropped it in the bottom and then covered it with the food when I poured it into the bin. No wallet. I called the nail salon. No wallet. I drove back to the nail salon, searched the parking lot and visited every business in the strip mall. No wallet. I drove to the high school, dragged MA out of practice so I could search her bag to see if she had it. No wallet. It had vanished without a trace.

To this very second, I cannot fathom how it went missing. Did aliens aim their death ray at my car and suck it out through the sun roof? I have no viable explanation for where it went. The only scenario I can come up with is that when I dropped MA at soccer, the wallet fell on the floor of the passenger side and dropped out when she got out of the car. It’s not a perfect fit, but I didn’t go anywhere else. And it’s gone.

I went home and reluctantly canceled everything, convinced it was going to turn up in my freezer or under the bathroom sink. But this morning, I received confirmation of my worst fear: a bad person had my wallet and, even worse, had used the girl scout check card that I had forgotten to cancel. I had even forgotten I had it. But this lucky person found it and used the sweat of innocent girl scouts to fuel up his vehicle. Vile, indescribable bastard!! There is no torture in hell worthy of someone who would rip off the girl scouts. Why not torture a few kittens and steal a homeless woman’s shopping bag? Same thing if you ask me.

But at least now I knew the wallet was not going to come back to me with its nice, shiny hundred dollar bill intact. Probably the thief bought beer and munchies inside the gas station with my Benjamin, filled up his car with girl scout cookie profit and then drove off to party with hordes of crack whores. May his testicles be stricken with flesh eating fungus!!

Forced to face the reality of my loss, I went to replace my driver’s license this morning. I had been putting it off just in case I found my wallet in the dishwasher, but now I knew it wasn’t coming back. So I located the proper documentation and made my way to the license office.

Surprisingly, the office was devoid of customers. I walked to the driver’s license counter, where the clerk was busy scrubbing the desk with a Lysol wipe. As I watched, she scrubbed the counter furiously, wiped down the signature pad, ran it up the pen and chain that were mounted on the desk and then rubbed down her computer monitor. “Be with you….in just a minute…” she huffed, scrubbing away. “It’s just….that people come….in here with…their germs….and I don’t want….to get sick.” She got a new wipe and started going over everything again. Then she disposed of the wipes, got a big squirt of Germex, and made a big production of lathering up. You would’ve thought she was about to perform open heart surgery.

Reader, I am not proud of my actions. You would’ve thought I had been humbled by my recent loss and filled with a desire to treat my fellows more kindly than I myself had been treated. Alas, my soul had undergone no such conversion and as I stood and watched her scrub, I started coughing as loudly and violently as possible. I channeled the spirit of all those who had gone before, after succumbing to tuberculosis and I coughed and choked as if I were about to expire on the spot.

“I know what you mean,” I gasped between paroxysms, “I am just getting over a cold myself.” This is not an exaggeration; she actually shuddered. And the sight of that shudder filled me with an extremely mean-spirited glee. I continued to cough as she entered my information into the computer and took my money. I coughed even more loudly as she took my picture. I silently offered up entreaties to the Gods of Mucous that I might be given one really big, really juicy sneeze, but alas, it was not to be. I contented myself with coughing visibly into my hand, then using the same hand to sign my license with the pen she had just wiped. “Thanks and have a nice day,” I said cheerily, eyes tearing up, as I coughed my way out the door. She didn’t say anything. I wanted to stick around to see if she was going to scrub down the counter after I left, but I didn’t want to be too obvious.

So ends the saga of my missing wallet. Not only did I lose my wallet, I have lost my faith in humanity. At least temporarily. I’m sure I’ll be back to my Pollyanna self tomorrow. By the time my new check card gets here, I’m sure I’ll have recovered my optimism. I am trying not to obsess about the fact that somewhere, someone has all of my personal information and now knows where I live. I am making Nancy get my mail as soon as it comes, just in case the perp is lurking around, waiting for my new credit cards to appear so he can party with the crack whores again. Oh well, c’est la vie!! I wonder if the driver’s license lady started doping up on Vitamin C as soon as I left?

Sometimes I feel very unloved. I feel I am an inconsequential speck in the universe, one who exists only to wash all the dirty underwear generated by my family. And boy, can they generate!! Then I get a comment that restores my sense of self worth. Even at age 40, fat and wrinkly, face marked with the first of what is sure to be MANY age spots, I can still inspire a great passion. It’s as if my fairy godmother has waved her magic wand and spoken the words “you are desirable” and voila….I am!!

That the passion I inspired is because of my saliva is hardly the point. In fact, somewhere, some lonely, very creepy man, wants me to lick him. It makes me feel sort of powerful and nauseous all at once. Here is the comment, in case you follow me on Facebook and can’t be bothered to hit my site, which is a shame because you miss little gems like this one, referencing an old blog:

Dear Jennifer! (the exclamation mark is his!) I’m really envious of your children. I haven’t ever experienced spit-wash, but I have seen some loving mothers in my country (i.e. in Russia) doing it to their children. Spitbath always seemed to me a symbol of love. But neither my mother nor any other woman did it to me. That’s why to be washed thoroughly with female saliva, to feel its fragrance (yes, especially in the morning, my saliva is VERY FRAGRANT!!) was always and is still my dream. I don’t know who may do it to me now. Perhaps, the only chance is to meet a loving girl, who will treat me like mother and spit-wash me. Dear Jennifer! You are the best mother in the world! (Damn straight I am!!!)

Peter…is this your comment??? Somewhere in the world, possibly in Russia, some man wants me to lovingly lick him. I would prefer to be desired for my rapier sharp wit or my searing intellect, but maybe that will follow. Perhaps, as I am bathing him in my motherly spit, I can regale him with my observations on the absurdity of the human condition, as evidenced by my giving a grown man a full body saliva treatment. As far as perversions go, this one ranks up there at the top of weird. I know there are people out there who get off on all manner of bizarre things, including crushing hamsters and cannibalism, but somehow, the ‘mother spit’ one seems just a bit weirder. Can I just say EWWWWWWWW here???? I wonder just what this person googled to land on my site? “Spit on me oh Earth Goddess and bathe me with your fragrant saliva”??? Type that into a search engine and see where you land!! I thought I would get a lot of hits from the “big busted lesbian” blog, but I haven’t had anything to compare with this comment. Apparently big busted lesbians are not in high demand these days; probably has something to do with the economy or the shifting Democratic power base or maybe even global warming.

Personally, I am not at all turned on by saliva. I don’t desire to be licked by anyone at any time. And I’m certainly NOT going to lick a man. Men are furry. The idea of trying to work through all that fur with my tongue makes me gag. I hate getting hair in my mouth. That’s a sure way to get me to vomit. And there’s probably someone out there who has a vomit fetish and I guess I’ll hear from him next. “Oh Jennifer, how lucky I would be if you would heave the contents of your stomach onto my naked body…” GAH….I am making myself sick!!!

So….out there in the vast wasteland of cyberspace, someone wants me, not for myself, but for my saliva. It’s just my luck. There’s always a stipulation. They always want me for what I can do for them, never just for who I am. Figures. Still, it’s the thought that counts. Even if it’s a creepy thought, it’s still a thought!!

I received a Kindle for Christmas. It wasn’t something I had asked for, or even particularly wanted, but now that I own it, I can’t imagine my life without it. Renee asked me what the allure was and I answered, quite seriously, “instant gratification”. At any time I can choose a book, press a button and it is delivered to my machine in less than a minute. All the world of literature is suddenly at my fingertips.

Hmmm….yes….about that. Well, I’m a bit immature and don’t always display the best judgement. I was playing with it tonight, I was all alone in the house and I suddenly wondered “can you order DIRTY BOOKS on it?” Yes, I am a freak. Yes, I have never grown out of the adolescent obsession with NAUGHTY books. I didn’t really want to read one. I just wanted to see if it was possible to order one. So I scrolled down to the search bar and typed in ‘erotica’.

Naturally around 45,000 titles popped up on the screen. And naturally, I started scrolling through them to see what they were about. Lots and lots of NAUGHTY GIRLS WHO LIKE TO BE SPANKED (really??? I HATE being hit on the butt) and BAD GIRLS WHO ARE HOME ALONE LOOKING AT NAUGHTY BOOKS ON THEIR KINDLES and titles like that. Then it happened.

The Kindle has this toggle switch thing and you use it to arrow up and down. To select something, you push it in. It’s a bit sensitive and as I was scrolling, I accidentally pushed it in and ordered “THE ANTHOLOGY OF BIG BUSTED LESBIAN EROTICA”. To my horror, a little message popped up and said “thank you for your order, we are downloading “THE ANTHOLOGY OF BIG BUSTED LESBIAN EROTICA” to your machine immediately. Have a nice day!”

My eyes bugged out and I frantically toggled down to the cancel button. I made it just in time. “Are you SURE you want to delete “THE ANTHOLOGY OF BIG BUSTED LESBIAN EROTICA?” the machine queried, disappointment quite evident in its tone. If there was a “for God’s sake YES cancel it now immediately, PLEASE” button, I would have clicked on it. I settled for pushing “yes” however and the machine complied, albeit somewhat reluctantly. I believe it took a perverse, inanimate pleasure in my embarrassment. The entire experience was very humiliating. Nothing against big busted lesbians, but I don’t want them cavorting around my electronic device and doing the dirty with Jane Eyre or Scarlett O’Hara. I have some morals, you know.

Then I had to run in the other room, get on the computer and delete the incriminating e-mails Amazon sends when you order a book. Because heaven forbid that Stalin come home and find that I have ordered such a book. All I need is for him to think I am pursuing BIG BUSTED LESBIANS because the idea would certainly stimulate his imagination and not in a good or healthy way. I opened my email and found two messages from Amazon: “Thank you for ordering “THE ANTHOLOGY OF BIG BUSTED LESBIAN EROTICA”, your credit card will be charged immediately.” I deleted it. The next email read “Per your request, we have canceled your order for “THE ANTHOLOGY OF BIG BUSTED LESBIAN EROTICA” and your credit card will not be charged. If you change your mind, however, the big busted lesbians will be waiting.” Ok, I made up that last part. Still, the entire email conveyed a great disappointment that I had brushed off the big busted lesbians without even giving them a chance. Certainly not a very Christian attitude on my part.

So the evidence of my indiscretion has been erased and yet…is anything ever REALLY erased in cyberspace? My little error will probably result in me being placed on a thousand lists of people who enjoy reading about “BIG BUSTED LESBIANS”. Books about BIG BUSTED LESBIANS will shoot to the front of the line in my preferences on Amazon. Because of one slip of the toggle switch, I have been forever labeled as a lover of BIG BUSTED LESBIANS. Well, it could be worse; at least I didn’t click on DONKEYS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM!!