I’ll have a virgin scotch on the rocks, please.
“I love you like my left ovary.”
This, coming from a chick you’ve only just met, is a pretty high compliment in my book.
I’d never have heard this if I hadn’t been struck by ‘Yes Man’ – Jim Carrey’s latest film. An invitation into town for a young wan’s birthday party on a frosty winter’s night while up the duff and unable to drink would normally have me gushing excuses; let alone the comfort-zone thing, there’s the fact that I’ve nothing pretty that doesn’t involve elastic to wear. No energy or cash either, but hey… sometimes when you say ‘Yes’ to things, you get led to situations that can be pretty damn interesting.
She was a corset-dealer from Connemara with long black-is-the-colour hair, she wore a candy necklace and drank red wine from the bottle with a straw, and I’d never have met her if I’d been sitting around on my arse at home.
Don’t you just love films like that?
HAPPY NEW YEAR T’YIZ ALL!!
Great expectations
“You all think Christmas just happens. You think all this goodwill just falls from the freakin sky. Well, it doesnt! It falls out of my holly jolly butt! So you can cook your own damn turkey. Wrap your own damn presents. And hey, while youre at it, you can all ride a one horse open sleigh to hell!”
Lois Griffin, ‘A Very Special Family Guy Freakin’ Christmas’
I went to a really lovely carol service last night, everything was frosty breath and little donkeys and talk of Bethlehem… but then I was discovered. Laughingboy drew attention with his chaffinch impressions… epic tooth grinding that even managed to drown out 250 voices all singing at once. In a bid for peace, at one stage I just stuffed his bib in his mouth to chew on. He looked like a kidnap victim, but hey.
Nice people started to talk to me and noticed that I was missing from their flock, but there are only a handful of ways that I can guild the fact that I’m just too damn lazy to go to Church with the kids on a Sunday. Sundays count for 50% of my weekly lie-in potential! Push it forward to lunchtime maybe and we’ll talk.
“Join us.”
“Yes, join us… you’re one of us now!”
“Join ussss!”
It’s difficult to do a legger when you’ve a wheelchair. They were all pregnant too… I touch my belly and wonder if this child will be born blue-eyed and blonde, despite the absence of genes to tell it to. If it is, I’m giving it to Brangelina.
-o-
Go and visit the Corner of Jocelyn Testes Harder. Hers is the kind of Christmas we should be having!
Deer whistles and curried dog
Oh yeah!! I nearly forgot!!!
I happened upon a podcast last Saturday night… they let me into it and I threw it into turmoil and chewed curry in their ears. It’s a cleverly edited chain of ramblings about deer and car crashes and turkey jerky and other such weirdness.
You’ll hear the voices of Grandad Himself, Jefferson Davis, Dr Don, Brian F and me… I’m the only female, the one who always sounds half-asleep… I had no idea that’s what I sound like but I guess it could always be worse, hey.
Dust off yer boots!
K8′s Kryptonite
The death of a small kid carries a velocity that doesn’t slow with distance travelled or time passed. It crashes through families and friends within its radius and leaves them lost and confused, and utterly out of their depth.
It happened a year ago and ever since then I’ve been afraid. What once was two families linked through coincidence with so much in common, suddenly shattered into a thousand pieces and no amount of King’s men could put it all together again. We met briefly a few times and gave each other tight hugs and meaningful gazes and exchanged dirty jokes, but it it’ll never be the same… an elephant sits on the situation that nobody can ignore. She wears a dog-tag around her neck with Superman’s classic ‘S’ symbol, her kid’s name is written just below. It nestles in her cleavage which got pounced on by her four-year old and the chain broke today when we met for coffee… her eyes welled up and she felt sick all of a sudden. She fumbled with the links and I fumbled for something to put into the vaccuum… the room fell silent and the rest of the shopping mall ceased to exist, everything got sucked into her grief and I sat there like an Easter Island head and muttered stupid and irrelevant things. Then the moment passed and life went on as usual and we ordered more coffee.
She asked after Laughingboy, her passed son’s best mate at school. Thick as thieves in their own trapped worlds, Laughingboy got pretty upset at his funeral even though most thought he didn’t have the capacity for it, myself included oddly enough. Their classroom is totally different now.
I began to vent about Laughingboy’s latest habit of grinding his teeth, about how he grinds solidly for every hour of his wakefulness and about how it’s getting louder and louder as the enamel is being worn away and the surface area widens and sounds a bit like chaffinches, if you’re lucky enough to find your happy place. I was half-way through my rant and suddenly I realised what I was doing. Children’s idiosyncracies are so much better above ground than below, no matter how annoying they are. I’d forgotten that and was smearing it all over the elephant and now it was all pissed off. Except it wasn’t. She laughed and I wrapped things up with ‘apart from that, he’s fine!’ and that was that. I felt like such a shit. A really confused shit.
Some people have a gift for listening and other people don’t. I’m one of those clumsy absurd kind of people, and I’d love to get my hands on a copy of ‘Tact for Dummies’ if there is such a thing… something with key tips about knowing exactly what to say to pull people out of their deep stinky dark well instead of hovering around the issue and grunting nonsensically… that would be great.
Life is so perverse. All the woman needs is a hug and a wee distraction now and then, but all I worry about is feeling guilty because my son is still alive. You just can’t laugh that sort of thing off, can you?
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #3
They should dedicate a whole chapter to this problem in them maternity books, but so far I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere. I don’t know why.
There are three types of people out there who can get away with wearing dungarees… toddlers, the downright quirky, and pregnant women. My advice to the latter is; when you are unstrapping yourself in order to pee (which is a common thing these days let’s face it), don’t turn your back to the toilet as you do so.
What! It’s a very serious problem!
Pee-soaked dungaree straps can be the difference between a good day and complete and permanent loss of sanity, y’know.
Ten things they don’t warn you about before you get pregnant… #2
The ‘outie’ phenomenon.
Apologies to all Omphalophobics out there… you may want to look away.
It comes as a terrible shock to one day look down at your navel to find that it has turned itself inside-out. It’s an even greater shock to stick your pinkie finger in there to find there’s a hole that leads to somewhere possibly very intriguing. Offering to have other people stick their fingers in there is not a good idea… the resulting scream of “EW!!” tends to make the foetus jump, which is a high price to pay for personal sadism.
It makes one realise that there are certain things one shouldn’t do if they ever intend to be pregnant;
- Navel Piercing: I had my belly button pierced during a rosemantic getaway with my fella once… I did it to soften the pain of his tongue piercing. I never really wore jewellery in there, it kept getting hooked onto my belt buckle which is not to be sneezed at. I let the hole close, which never really happens with a belly-button piercing, especially if you get yourself in trouble. I remember being in labour with my first child, and sharing a room with a young male midwife who almost passed out when he spotted the gaping maw of my self mutilation. When he asked “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?!”, I replied via ventriloquism using the piercing wound. He was not amused…. not even when I sang ‘Blue Moon’ with it. Nitrous Oxide is wonderful stuff.
- Tattoos of dolphins ‘jumping over’ your navel: That is, unless you also like Humpback whales. Humpback whales who have been through intense orthopaedic surgery, for that matter. It’s not pretty. Any sort of tattoo is a bad idea in the belly department for that reason, for while everything else might shrink back to normality, tattoos don’t. They disobey logic in all its forms… maybe this is where Picasso got his inspiration?
