She Gave Birth To Me, She Has To Speak To Me. Right?

Oh. My mom is SO not going to like this post.

I woke up this morning with a zillion blog ideas bouncing around inside my head. Yesterday Facebook hijacked my brain. Today, I think THE CAT IN THE HAT has seized control.

NONE of those original blog ideas, however, involved our SEPTIC SYSTEM until the guy we hired to pump out ALL THREE tanks showed up around 9 o’clock and I’m thinking BONUS! THAT’S NOT SOMETHING YOU SEE EVERYDAY and WHO DOESN’T WANT TO SEE FIRST HAND WHAT’S COMING OUT OF THE JACKSON’S SEWER SYSTEM?

But then my friend Jocelyn begged me not to blog about that. And in spite of the fact that she hardly gave me the time of day time back in high school when she was a rockin’ senior with the big blonde hair and I was just a lowly sophomore growing out a bad Dorothy Hamill haircut …

Come to think of it NEVER MIND JOCELYN.

I WILL blog about my septic system.

Just not today.

So, here’s what happened.

Mistake #1: I got up and logged on to Facebook.

Mistake #2: I never logged off of Facebook.

Mistake #3: I got in the shower thinking about Facebook.

Mistake #4: A terrible repressed memory from high school surfaced in the shower and I shared it with my friend Jeff who emailed back with this: THAT’S A GREAT THING TO POST ON YOUR BLOG.

Caveat: Jeff lives in Missouri. Not in my shower.

So, here’s a warning, my gentle readers. If the word FART offends you … GO AWAY NOW.

With that said, may I remind you that yesterday I admitted how a MEME forced me to admit publicly that I am ANOSMIC. That is, I have no sense of smell. Never have.

Once again WIKIPEDIA comes to the rescue … you can read all about my kind here. In fact, you may want to go check this out ASAP as Wikipedia, the user edited online encyclopedia, may actually have ME listed under NOTABLE ANOSMIC INDIVIDUALS and I have absolutely NO IDEA who might have added my name to this distinguished list. I swear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosmia

Generally the no smell thing has caused me very little interruption in living a largely fulfilling life but there have been some drawbacks. Like not knowing I was dragging my kids through the grocery store with hugely dirty diapers and enduring the glares and gags from my fellow shoppers. Rude.

Oh, and fully grasping the reality that FARTS STINK way too late in high school to prevent a humiliating dating experience that has scarred me for life. Or least scarred me for the last 4 hours since I remembered it in the shower.

Because a lot of my friends from high school read this blog, I’m going to call my date involved in this humiliating dating experience “Stuart” in order to protect his anonymity. Plus, maybe he’s forgotten.

I have this vague remembrance of “Stuart” being a pretty nice and pretty respectful guy. He was also a decent kisser who lived in this other worldly house up on the hill outside of town with a grand piano facing a wall of glass looking out over the skyline. Kinda like one of those smooth serial killer homes. But without the serial killing.

Because of the no smelling thing I have to admit for a long time I really believed the "gross-ness" of farts was largely due to the noise they make. Not the smell. I think I always knew, on some level, they had a distinctive smell but not necessarily a bad one. They were only gross in the sense that air had just exited your fanny and everyone knew it. Like little air craps.

So for years I was a big fan and master executioner of what I have come to understand as the SILENT BUT DEADLY fart. If I farted in a crowd and nobody heard it, then it didn't really exist and certainly no one could blame it on me.

EXISTENTIAL QUESTION FOR EVERYONE WHO IS WAY SMARTER THAN ME: If you fart in the woods and no one smells it will the trees still tip over?

Anyway, in smaller groups I always went to the ever reliable THOU WHO SMELT IT DEALT IT defense. Sometimes, just to throw people off, I even “smelled” it first.

But ... and here you will realize that I wasn't always rubbing two brain cells together ... it NEVER EVER occurred to me that if there were only two people in close proximity to each other and one of those people happened to be me and I farted silently BY DEFAULT THE OTHER PERSON WOULD KNOW THAT I HAD CUT THE CHEESE.

Until “Stuart” pointed this out to me one night when we were kissing in his white pickup truck and I cut one loose worthy of a long haul trucker eating pickled eggs.

No offense to pickled egg eating long haul truckers intended.

Sure, I denied it. But it was futile.

He knew.

I knew he knew.

And he knew I knew he knew.

I DEALT IT.

“Stuart” and I were certainly "serious" enough at that point to warrant a formal breakup but, honestly, I have no recollection of it and can't remember if all this took place BEFORE or AFTER he and another date had their pictures taken in my living room. Which was the photograph posted on Facebook that dredged up this horrible memory.

Either way, my guess is one of the reasons “Stuart” is smiling in that picture taken in my living room with another date is because he knows that other girl isn't going to gas him out of his own truck that night.

So, to everyone I went to grade school, junior high and high school with … IT WAS ME.

PROBABLY EVERY SINGLE TIME.

P.S. To my friend JEFF, you can expect a call from my mother any minute now.

Showering With Strangers

i showered with a stranger this morning.

i should have expected it, having witnessed the Law of Attraction at work and all ...

you see, i spent the weekend at a family reunion in oklahoma.

got to hang out with my very cool, rodeo-ing 18-year-old nephew ben.

we gave him his high school graduation gift - new macbook with all the bells and whistles.

seeing the look on his face when he realized he wasn't JUST getting the 5 dollar sonic giftcard was priceless.

so he loaded up his new laptop with some songs from his phone's mp3 player ... stuff i hadn't heard before as i'm not really all that in to country music. and he grew up and continues to reside in oklahoma.

'nuff said.

so ben's playing for me his favorites, one of which is a song by brad paisley titled "ticks".

and i must say it's danged funny.

we sat by the pool watching the "young-uns" swim in the dark and by the glow of his laptop i learned the lyrics, which we then sang out LOUD until i couldn't get them out of my head ...

"cause i'd like to see you out in the moonlight
i'd like to kiss you way back in the sticks
i'd like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
and i'd like to check you for ticks"

so you've probably guessed it - the small, dark and decidedly repulsive stranger i discovered in my shower this morning was, yes, a TICK.

all together now ... eeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

he was strategically located on my hip, just far enough around that i'd need the flexibility of an owl to get a good look at him.

so i called in the big guns.

john. a lighter. a pair of needle-nose pliers.

i don't really want to go in to the details. suffice it to say, this morning's tick removal wasn't pretty.

but DANG, i have no idea where he came from, all i know is i haven't had a tick since i was like 10 years old and boom, two days after belting out tick lyrics for a whole weekend i got one setting up house on my hindquarters.

man panties

i'm the mother of a very courageous little boy.

john and i took the kids jet skiing in mexico.

knowing riley's love for speed, john, um, "volunteered" to ride with her. and when i say "volunteered" i mean he pulled my hair, poked me in the eye, and dislocated my knee as we were racing to see who got to her jet ski first.

nah, not really. but we both really, really wanted to ride with her because we both like to go really, really fast.

in contrast, wyatt sometimes tells me to slow down when i'm pushing him around the grocery store in their racecar shopping carts. "too fast" he'll tell me.

too fast? i've only got 2 wheels that are spinning regularly ... the third is tangled up in some kind of string they use to truss up hams and the fourth is not even touching the ground. it's not possible to go "too fast" in a rig like this.

but a jet ski ... ah, there's some speed for ya.

john and i once jet skiied all the way around paradise island and the atlantis resort twice in our allotted time when we'd been warned we'd be pushing it to make it around once.

his hind quarters looked like he'd been sitting on a cheese grater when he was done (something about little mesh swimsuits inside the outside swimsuit ... guys, i feel for ya.)

anyway, i drew the short jet ski straw with wyatt as my riding buddy.

we got on. i "accelerated" enough to move us a foot or two off shore and he started ordering me to "SLOW DOWN!"

bummer.

so, keeping us just out of a stall, we head out in to the caribbean ocean.

my son and i.

the first ten minutes went something like this:

wyatt: SLOW DOWN!

me: I CAN'T GO ANY SLOWER

jet ski: STALL

wyatt: SLOW DOWN!

me: I CAN'T. THE JET SKI IS OFF

then the next fifty minutes went something like this:

wyatt: SLOW DOWN!

me: I CAN'T GO ANY SLOWER

jet ski: STALL

wyatt: SLOW DOWN!

me: I CAN'T. THE JET SKI IS OFF

but then our hour on the jet skis was over and we went to the poolside restaurant for lunch. there, wyatt proceeded to point out very loudly, as an obviously european fellow strolled by in his speedo, that YOU DON'T WEAR YOUR MAN PANTIES OUTSIDE.

and i fell back in love with him immediately.