next friday.

ugh. it takes so long to make it back here these days...

but i'll catch you up with a few highlights of the week...

on halloween we braved the cold for trick or treating...the duke was a civil war union general...at first his jacket turned out to look like something captain merill stubing would wear for a formal occasion on the love boat...

but after a few tweaks, a bunch more glue, little less gold braid, and a few glasses of wine he looked terrific!

wingman went as a quidditch player and looked very cute...i made the robe a few years ago and only had to hem it...the only problem was he got so attached to the black fingerless gloves that went with the costume that he has worn them constantly since...along with a lot of black...and his striped skull cap...

can i tell you.

he's five and i can't really imagine what real adolescent experimenting will bring...

why do i think there is eyeliner in his future?

and what is it about halloween that brings out the inner hoochie in girls and women?...i mean, really?...if i saw one bare middrift on a five year old i saw a million!!!...and when they become barely legal it gets much worse...oh, it's hoochieween!!!...look, i'm hooker for a day!!!...whee!!!

and we wonder why there's no woman in the white house yet...

i don't...i figure in every woman's life there's at least one hoochieween costume...but more importantly at least one hoochieween costume picture...enough said.

myself, i plead the fifth.

and i'm sorry, but there are some people who should just NOT be wearing unstructured mostly mesh costumes...i say know your limitations when it comes to many things...but especially so in the arena of the "naughty (insert profession of your choice)" costume...

scary.

also this week i discovered you tube...oh my god you can find almost anything on there!!!...the lord of the ring came in the back where the computer is and i had the headphones on...he said

"what are you doing?"

"oh, my god i've just discovered you tube!!...it's totally cool!!...i just watched an old al stewart concert video...he was singing year of the cat live!!...can you believe it!!...next i'm gonna watch stevie nicks and lindsey buckingham when they reunited and sang on the david letterman show!!"

"oh, really?"

"what can i say?...i come late to technology"

"yeah, and then this is what you choose to use it for"

party pooper...

no matter, because i've recently discovered a crop of prince videos that i'm dying to watch!

and because i'm on a roll i will relay to you the following conversation from yesterday...i was having my near daily exchange with the duke about how he needs to quit dawdling and get his school work done...to which he responded with what he thought was a humorous response

"yeah, yeah i'm gettin' to it...keep your shirt on, lady"

then the lord of the ring piped up from his office

"duke!...do not call your mother *lady*!"

then from my computer i responded

"yeah!...you have no business calling me a lady!"

"oh good lord, honey, you know what i meant!"

at this point the duke closed the door that separated the lord of the ring and me from him...

i'm assuming he finished his work and fed himself lunch but zz top was on you tube so i have no idea what he did the rest of the afternoon...

okay, ha ha, i keed, i keed...what kind of mother would i be if i spent the afternoon watching zz top on you tube not knowing what my child was up to?

it was really the cars.

x.

defending your life

middle school: mean girls

it took me a long time to realize i was bullied in middle school...oh, and by the way, when in the hell did i start calling it "middle school?"...i'm from the central valley, k-fed country, home of wine in a screw cap jug...it was called JR. HIGH for criminy sakes...

"middle school" sounds like you own horses...

any. way. moving right along, there were two girls who verbally abused me for two years solid...and i suppose since i wasn't getting the shit kicked out of me or my chemin de fer bag stolen i didn't consider it "bullying"...

but that's what it was...and it sucked...they would say i smelled like pee in some *bit* they would do about three or four times a week...

"hey mg #1, do you smell that?"

"what, mg #2?"

"that smell"

"what smell?...oh you mean the pee smell?"

"yes, mg #2...the pee smell...i wonder where it's coming from?"

then they would both turn and look directly at me...

as you can imagine the students around this exchange would giggle and laugh...every single time...i'd like to say it got old, but since i was the object of it, it never really did...

we had some sort of science class together and in some act of stupidity, cruelty, or naivete whenever it was time to group up the teacher would always group me with the mean girls!...again, do they not notice what goes in their classrooms?...do they not care?

so, for one particular project we had to collect gutter water from in front of each of our respective houses and compare the findings on slides...like how they were different or the same or whatever...

gutter water...you can see where this is going...

so, we get to school the day of the project and i had my jar of gutter water and i put it on my desk...

so of course, mg#1 pipes up

"oh, there's no drinking in class, x"

ha ha...

so it comes to the time of the project and i have my jar of water and the mean girls don't have anything...so i ask

"where is your gutter water?"

"oh, we don't drink gutter water"

ha ha ha.

AGAIN, i'm sure, i mean i must have thought this was getting old at the time, but intimidation coupled with an already low self-esteem coupled with JR. HIGH does things to your brain...

so when they were done laughing, mg#1 says

"well, since you ask, we don't have any gutter water in front of our houses because where we live there are no gutters"

obviously i'm confused and so i engage them further...god, i was a slow child...

"how is that possible?"

"well, where we live there are no gutters because there are no sidewalks"

"yeah, where we live there are no sidewalks because we don't want just any old person to be able to walk in front of our houses"

oh. good. lord...if it were the re-written movie version i would have at this point said

"oh yeah, if i lived in the trailer park under the overpass i suppose i wouldn't want anyone to walk in front of my trailer house to see where i lived either"

but this was in real time 1983...and the truth of the matter was that they lived at the country club where there were actually no sidewalks, and i really actually at one point lived in the trailer park under the overpass...

so as it happens in both real life and in the movies, since i had the jar of gutter water i did the project and they copied my work...and the teacher was either too stupid, too cruel, or too naive to care...

it went on and off like this for the two years of JR. HIGH and then we went on to high school...i had absolutely no dealings with mg#2 (mg#1 went somewhere else) the four years of high school other than to wonder from afar at her continued popularity despite her PROMINENT though apparently noticeable to no one other than me FACIAL HAIR!

i kid. you. not.

the world is an explicable and cruel place...but rarely to those who actually deserve it...

they had to come up with the whole *the meek shall inherit the earth* because there somehow has to be something to make up for jr. high and high school for the majority of us who peaked much much MUCH later on...

but despite my high school respite from the mean girls, as it happens in both real life and in the movies, they do show back up once more later on in our tale...

but, that's a story for another day...