the olden days

i didn't write for a while because my husband came back from a business trip and i ran out of wine after staying up all night drinking and reading people's random blogs for two weeks. also i was feeling kind of depressed about what a crap hole the whole world seems to me lately, and i just didn't want to unload heavy boring stuff all day. so here's to the positive - hooray!! my kids are alive! bombs aren't falling on my house! i don't live on a farm anymore!! etc..!!!

anyway, a few old friends came to visit over the weekend, and that was nice. none other than my old "crotch" band mate, terri, was in town. she stopped by with her two boys and they staged elaborate star wars related scenarios and fought many plastic light saber duels in the front yard while we talked on and on about how cool we used to be. there were no jam sessions, since we could never play anything much without the drum cues of randy, our drummer.

we spent half the night and a few bottles of wine on our recollections of the old days . her husband politely smiled and nodded, as he had heard it all before. my husband seemed surprised and said things like, "i didn't know that. you never told me that etc..." his favorite story was that for some reason we both had very realisitic rubber baby boy dolls that we used to dress in pirate outfits and take to bars with us. we would demand highchair seats, which for some reason most of the bars actually had, and we would sit them in the seats all night. in my dim recollections, everybody seemed to think it was very funny and we were always popular when we did that, though i don't know why. if i were working and two wacky ladies in polyester zebra pantsuits came in with rubber babies, i think i would be annoyed. but nobody ever was. of course i am a tired old lady imagining myself as a middle aged bar waitress now, like alice or flo from "mel's diner," instead of seeing the perspective of a 20 year old college person bored and waiting for the work night to end.

miles also stopped by that night and he was the fencing consultant. he sucessfully fended off a full scale assault from all four kids at once, each madly slashing a hard plastic light saber at his guts, while he was armed with just a single noodle of pipe insulation. it was truly impressive. he's still got it. the only sad thing is that he wasn't wearing his drunk suit (a "karate kid"-styled headband with chinese writing over a red sun) that terri accidentally lost during one of our frat-party invasions. to complete the outfit, he also used to wear, in tandem with his drunk suit, a photo-journalism vest with about 100 pockets full of half-pints of gin and vodka and lime wedges and tonic and cigars etc... he was a walking bar.

as luck would have it, the next night, my former pop-culture mentor and unwitting lifecoach, fred, stopped by. he found out that he and my four year old son have a lot in common because they both really like the "scooby-doo meets batman" episodes. both my kids talked at great lengths about the various plot twists and turns of scooby-doo and star wars. fred smiled and nodded a lot which is all that my kids require to consider it good conversation.

so it was all good. i still can't figure out the spellcheck button. i push it and nothing happens. so please forgive the spelling. i'm just a country girl toggling back and forth from blogger to dictionary.com. i do my best.

these modern times

i keep thinking that i am going to start making short and snappy posts. sharp little zingers both clever and ironic that stab through all the crap right into the very heart of the issue. with my oratorical nature, though, i don't really think i have the talent for that. and in these modern times, i'm not sure there is a concise beating heart to every issue anyway. it's more like a long, tangled, fibrous cancer mass entwining an abundance of conflicting data and convoluted facts. how do you find the little mutation that started it all?

so what are the cancers nagging at my mind today? take your pick. i'm about to go on and on about wars and terrorism and who cares if joe lieberman splits the democratic party etc... but the funny thing about this dumb blog is that a lot of people that i lost contanct with over the years have found me again by reading my obnoxious posts on some of my friends' blogs. so now we are all checking each others' blogs and emailing each other now, and it's pretty cool. i guess it has pre-empted all my brooding about how stupid everything is.

even though it seems like the government knows how many moles are on your butt, and every heroin addict has all your credit card numbers, it's pretty cool to stay in touch with people so easily now. starting next week i promise i am going to make a regular blog with pictures in it and information about stuff other than late night quasi-political rants. i am even going to figure out how to use the spell check button.

the blog stays

well, i guess i'll keep the blog. i came close to deleting the whole thing, but my husband and a few friends convinced me to keep it. (they also recommended that i not act on my previous metaphor of sitting in the bleachers without underpants) i did, however, change my name to a fake name, which is kind of like putting on a pair of bloomers, i guess.

anyway, i'll have to work on the fart jokes.

the self-exploration stops here...

i'm getting sick of this blog. it's just a little too honest and personal. i don't let anyone read my little notebooks full of bad poetry and shopping lists, but here i am blabbing my guts out under my real name. it's kind of like sitting in the bleachers wearing a mini skirt with no underpants on. i'm done with all that catharsis hooey. from now on it's all fart jokes.

so... what's up with your parents?

i can't stop myself. this is the last time i ponder something weighty. but now that i am a parent, and, as i hinted in the last post, i am thankful that my kids are live western kids not dead middle-eastern kids. seen in the larger context of the world, my upbringing of enough food and toughskins jeans seems almost luxurious. but back then it seemed traummatic that i didn't have jordache jeans.

my parents definitely chose the free market approach to child rearing - provide the basics but don't meddle with social and personal development issues. i was forever bitter when i paid my own way through college and marveled at all the lazy free-riders dumber than me getting better jobs, wearing better clothes and having more fun than me. but now that i am older, i am doing ok on my own and i feel a little pride in that. i even defended my parents when my one of my sisters, chief lobbyist of cornell's agricultural college, no less, dissed them for being unsupportive.

it's like we were born in a junkyard, i told her, but our parents gave us a really good toolbox. then we built a really sweet hotrod from crap we found laying around, and then one day, we drove out of the junkyard. and because we built the hotrod, whenever it broke down, we could fix it ourselves. she said that is the stupidest thing she ever heard and that i am a hillbilly. it's probably true.

anyway, now i am raising my kids in a totally different way. am i spoiling them? should i be yelling at them or smacking them around a little? i don't know. they seem much happier than i was, and they are full of self-confidence, BUT, are they ready for the school of hard knocks? who knows. someday if any of you ever meet my kids, let me know if you think they're jerks or fine, upstanding kids.

and please, if you want to, share your thoughts on your parents. they define your life and who you are, either because or in spite of them.

my second post

this was supposed to be a generic empty blog that i made just so i can comment on other blogs. but somehow my personality intersects at hypergraphia and self-fixation, so i just can't leave it alone. normally i save my musings for my hundreds of scattered spiral bound notebooks full of everything from shopping lists, field trip reminders for the kids, organizational and motivational hints to bad poetry, uber-doodles and all-out drunken rants (only after the kids are safely in bed, of course)

so here i am on my second post. i could go on for hours about all kinds of disappointments and unrealized dreams and goals fallen short of the mark and how the government sucks ass etc... but i am dumb enough to have this thing under my real name. and plus when i read that kind of stuff on other blogs, it's pretty boring (even though i am allegedly a boring old lady) i think everybody is fat and old now and jaded about something. so get in line and grab a tissue.

once i get past all that, i usually feel pretty good and optimistic even. the one good thing about having kids of your own is trying to see things the way they see them and remembering what a great playground the world can be. of course then i see pictures of dead kids the same ages as my kids being pulled out of the rubble of terrorist attacks, war zones and earthquakes. somedays i wonder, am i lucky? or am i just another dumbass waiting in an orderly line for a kick in the guts?

well, i was trying to go for upbeat, but that seems depressing. take it with a grain of salt.

my first post

all my friends have blogs, and i want one too. so i'm making this one just so i can reply to their posts if i ever want to. true to the blog's name, i am indeed a boring old lady. i am sneaking up on 40 and i have two ill-behaved male kids. they are cute, maybe even cuter than my two, better-behaved female cats, but i'm not posting either subjects' pictures. (not because i'm worried about perverted kid or cat stalkers... i simply don't know how to do it)

my only claim to fame is being in a few crappy basement bands in the early 90s where i wore vinyl shorts and played shrieking power chords behind offensive lyrics all the while imagining i was some sort of feminist intellectual. just in case anyone would like to compare my deluded feminist dream-state to the lyrics of our signature song, flattered to be battered, i would include the link to a musical sampling of crotch, one of the earliest bands i was in, but again, i don't know how to do it. maybe another day. perhaps on that day, you can see my cats too.

my other claim to something - this time less than fame, and perhaps not even noteriety, was the paper i published with a maverick chemist who would one day become my charming husband and father of those obnoxious kids i mentioned before. the title is one of my best works, a lilting poetic cauldron of prose so aptly called, "A Mechanistic Dichotomy in the Reactions of Cp2M(CH2+CHMe) (M = NB, Ta) with Catecholborane: Generation of Boryl Complexes by Propylene Hydroboration and Propylene Loss." even if i knew how, i probably wouldn't include the link to that one, even though it was a pretty good paper. at least i figured out how to use the italics button.

that is all for now. will anyone read this? are there other boring old folks out there who used to consider themselves cultural cognoscente only to become fat old dummies out of touch with pop culture while raising a bunch of spoiled kids ? am i the only one?? and if not, what the hell were you looking for that you came across this piece of tripe?