impress your friends and neighbors with this trick

oh, the joy of being a parent. our kids teach us so much.

for example, yesterday my 11 year old daughter came home looking like she'd been making out with a spider monkey in the back row of a movie theater.

yep, she was sporting a couple of hickeys. remember them? those little (or sometimes not so little) bruises acquired when another human being sucks on your neck?

if you don't know what i'm talking about, just pay close attention the next time you're standing in line to ride a roller coaster or you're picking up a 12 pack of crunchwrap supremes from the teenager at the taco bell drive-thru. chances are you'll get an eye full.

except hers weren't on her neck. imagine bruises around her mouth ... kinda like alice cooper makeup.

"whadja do to your lips?" i asked innocently when she got home from school.

"whadda mean?" she replied. innocently.

"go check 'em out." i sweetly demanded.

okay, so it appears you don't have to actually involve another human being in the hickey-giving or hickey-receiving process. turns out a little bitty eraser, as in the kind you pop on to the top of a pencil, will do. spider monkeys probably work too but the for the purpose of this demonstration we'll just stick with the pencil eraser method of self-hickey application:

step 1: squeeze the open end of the eraser in to a slit.

step 2: stick the now-slitted end of the eraser on to the skin all around your delicate lip area where it will open up and create suction, thereby sticking all by itself to the skin all around your delicate lip area.

step 3: repeat steps 1 and 2

step 4: repeat steps 1 and 2 again until you are out of erasers

step 5: lipsynch "slow ride" by foghat (which you have mastered thanks to hours and hours of practice on the guitar hero) for your friends with erasers hanging off your face causing them to fall on the floor in hysterical laughter and shoot milk out of their nose at the lunch table.

step 6: check out your brand new "eraser hickeys". ah, the sweet smell of victory.

they're still pretty vivid today, over 24 hours later, so chances are if you've got a big social event coming up like a wedding or a deposition or something you could get 'em going a couple of days early, time permitting, and still impress everyone with some manufactured evidence of your wild monkey-suckin' passionate love life.

well, i gotta run, tomorrow night's bunco night here in the neighborhood and i'm thinking a couple of hickeys is just the thing i need to get the ladies buzzing with jealousy over a rousing game of dice.