Dude, questions like “how was your day?” or “how was school?” Well, that’s just like interrogation, dude.
Why the check-out line always empties quickly when we are in it
Squirt: You said to pick out the kind of fruit I wanted in my lunch… well here it is. (Places a bag of kiwi fruit onto the conveyer belt.)
Bonnie: Kiwi! How are you going to eat this at school?
Squirt: I’ll bring a knife.
Bonnie: You can’t bring a knife to school! The district has a zero tolerance policy on knives!
Squirt: (rolls eyes) A plastic knife, Mom. Jeez!
Bonnie: I don’t think you’re allowed to bring plastic knives to school, either.
(Looks to Tiger for help)
Are you?
Tiger: Squirt, you can’t bring a knife to school. If you bring a plastic knife, you’ll get turned in. If you get turned in, you’ll have to go to the principal’s office. If you go to the principal’s office, he’ll lecture you. And if he lectures you, he’ll take the plastic knife AND JAB IT INTO YOUR CHEST.
Bonnie: Thanks, Tiger. (to Squirt) See?
What passes for discussions of literary theory in my house
As the mother of teenagers, I have observed that you can never know what to expect with these guys.
For example, when you ask your kid to fold the laundry, which teenager personality will answer? Will it be…
- Pleasant and Agreeable Teen: “Sure, Mom, I’ll do it right now!” (A very nice teenager.) Or
- Simmering Resentment Teen: “Oh, yeah, make me do it, when you never ask HIM!” (This teenager is not so pleasant.) Or
- Needs An Exorcism Teen: “YOU ACT LIKE YOU HATE ME!” (You may need a crucifix when dealing with this one.)
You just never know. So I jump at every chance to keep the lines of communication open with my boys.
Bonnie: So! How’s that book?
Tiger: (Nose in book.)
Eh.
Bonnie: It looks good!
Tiger: (Heavy sigh and slow, deliberate look that says, “You feed me, ergo I must listen to you. Hopefully this torture will end soon, and I may once again read in peace.”)
Bonnie: Oh.
(30 minutes later)
Tiger: (puts his book down)
You can tell these were by different authors.
Bonnie: Yowza! Why?
Tiger: Because, this guy, he got his sword in, whatchamacalit, in battle. In the first book. But this book — this book says he got it from his dad. I hate that.
Bonnie: That he got it from his dad?
Tiger: No! That he didn’t get it in battle!
Bonnie: So the series is inconsistent!
Tiger: I guess. It’s the different authors.
(He turns back to the book)
Bonnie: So! Which is your favorite author in this series? You know, I really cherish these little talks when we can have them!
Tiger: (Heavy sigh and slow, deliberate look that says, “If this torment continues, you may have to put me on some kind of medication.”)
Bonnie: Oh.
Monday Morning Mojo No. 1 and No. 2
I thought I might keep a record of what it’s like to live in a household with creatures who do not listen to me, namely
- a husband known for being
stingyfrugal — but who loves his bulldog more than any budget, - teens who prefer to store all valuables where they fall, and
- a bulldog in a major state of chewage.
Since today is the inauguration of the Monday Morning Mojo, you get two episodes. At the rate Mojo is currently eating up our belongings, I doubt I’ll ever run out of material, but we can always pray.
Monday Morning Mojo No. 1
WHAT: 100′ Extension Cord
HOW IT HAPPENED: We were gardening. One of the kids brought out the cord and went back for the electric hedge trimmer. Within three minutes Mojo determined the extension cord to be a serious terrorist threat and neutralized it on behalf of the United States of America, God bless us all. Or maybe he thought it looked like his Nylabone.
BONNIE’S REACTION: It wasn’t plugged in! Whew! Can you imagine what the vet charges to treat a crispy bulldog?
HUBBY’S REACTION: (to the dog) My baby! They almost fried you!
BOYS’ REACTION: No hedge trimming today, hooray! (several high fives)
REPLACEMENT COST: $27.99
Monday Morning Mojo No. 2
WHAT: Squirt’s Gameboy.
HOW IT HAPPENED: Mojo the Electronics Slayer found the Gameboy to be extremely impudent and deserving of a lesson. Or maybe he just liked the way it tasted. Either way, he had easy access because it — like everything else Squirt owns — was on the floor.
BONNIE’S REACTION: I told you to pick that Gameboy up yesterday! Nobody listens to me!
SQUIRT’S REACTION: There were three stages to Squirt’s reaction.
- Denial. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Much reaching to heaven and asking, “Why, O Why, did this happen to me?” Much ignoring of the answer: “because you left it on the floor.”
- More Denial. Much rejoicing when he found he could still turn it on and the audio worked. Much more sadness when he discovered the video was trashed.
- Extreme Denial. Much, much questioning of whether or not his mother could possibly understand such great loss. Much raucous laughter from his mother. Much.
HUBBY’S REACTION: (to Mojo) Poor pup! You could’ve choked! (to Squirt) Thank the dog for saving you from further Gameboy brain damage. Hey! Maybe Mojo’d like the way that damn X-box tastes!
REPLACEMENT COST: None. See “Hubby’s Reaction,” above.
Science to warm a teenage boy’s heart
Giant Balls of ‘Snot’ Explain Ocean Mystery.
Yes. Well. I think I might have phrased that one differently, but you know how hard it is to get the general public interested in science nowadays. I think the author is trying to hit the Dave “Boogers are My Beat” Barry demographic.
But that’s not what I wanted to show you. THIS is.
“The newly released images show a vast region of the Indian Ocean, about the size of Connecticut, glowing three nights in a row. The luminescence was also spotted from a ship in the area.” “Mystery Ocean Glow Confirmed in Satellite Photos” by Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience, Oct. 4, 2005
“The source for the light emission is under debate,” says Stefan Millinski, a Naval Research Laboratory scientist on the research team, “but my hypothesis is that the glowing is caused by bacteria colonizing the organic material in large quantities of laundry rinse water from a suburban home harboring two especially large and stinky teenage boys,” he said.
“Satellite detection will hopefully allow us to target the origin of this suburban washing machine source, and with our properly equipped research vessels we can then definitively answer the question of how two human beings can produce so many chemicals that not only smell bad, but which can cause an entire undersea neighborhood to light up like a Christmas tree.”
Millinski says he has asked authorities to be on the lookout for the laundering parent of these teenage boys. She can be recognized by the usual signs of stinky chemical exposure: facial lines and creases from constantly wrinking her nose, the compulsive grabbing for every box of Tide she passes, and/or a Tourette’s-like nervous tic that causes her to cry unexpectedly, “GET those dirty socks OFF my kitchen table… NOW!”
Call me “Dudette”
The latest addition to our household is my nephew Wolfie, who has moved in with us until that great day when:
- he resumes his interrupted college career,
- he finds a job that pays him $100,000 to start, or
- George Clooney persuades him to star in Oceans 13.
For him the benefits of this living arrangement are:
- he has a nice place in which to live
- the rent is cheap
- we feed him
For us the benefits of this arrangement are:
- he is very neat and tidy
- he is a great housekeeper
- the boys listen to him
That last point is an important one, as my boys don’t listen to me any more, even when they really should.
Bonnie: Squirt, you’ve worn that shirt three days in a row! Last night you SLEPT in it. Go upstairs and change your shirt before you kill off all our house plants!
Squirt: In a minute!
(note: “In a minute!” is Teenager Shorthand for “In one minute, her lips will stop flapping and she will go away.”)
But then Wolfie comes into the room.
Wolfie: Dude. That is one stinky ass shirt. Peew, Dude!
Squirt: (Runs upstairs to change his shirt)
As you can see, Wolfie has come in pretty handy lately.
There are a few cons to this living arrangement, however. For Wolfie, they are:
- We don’t have cable,
- we go to bed by 8:30 pm, and
- we’re about as exciting as a pasture of new-mown hay.
For us, the cons are:
- The boys listen to Wolfie.
Wolfie: To get a lady’s attention, you gotta tell her what she wants to hear!
(points at some girls behind our backyard fence)
Hull-oh, LADIES! You are lookin’ FINE!
(turns back to Squirt)
Give it a try, Dude.
Squirt: Hey!
(This was not directed at the fine ladies, but at his mother, when she tackled him)
Wolfie: Whoa, Dude!—I mean—Aunt Bonnie! Dude, she took you out!
I Wanna Be a Player
What a blast this would be. That Matthew Baldwin guy sure knows how to have fun.
So how can I play the Game? Would anybody ever invite me? Could I talk Hubby into playing?
Tiger is as enthusiastic as I am. He wants me to find out when they’ll play the Game in San Diego so the two of us can run off and play. Or maybe it’s a ruse: I find out where the Game is, and HE runs away to play it.
Whatever, we’re too wrapped up in other obligations to even think about spending a weekend in a rented van. Which, by the way, will cost big bucks right there. The rental fees will be nothing in comparison to the gas bill. It took $72 to fill up my gas tank yesterday.
Besides, we’d probably get a really awful theme. Instead of the way cool Galactic Consortium Press, it’d be probably something like Lovers of Fifities Functional, or Square Dancing Mafia.
Or we’d get into some major trouble when we discover our Game was used to cover up something insidious—like an actual crime! Because when you actually think about it, who puts this activity together?
Perhaps the drug lords are working on the San Diego version right now. A ton of cocaine, brought into the country right under the DEA’s nose! Players of the Game throw them off track by swarming all over the docks after solving a cryptic puzzle. The puzzle’s answer is: “Pretend you are smuggling a ton of cocaine! 100 points to each team authentic enough to get questioned by police!”
Hubby would have to bail Tiger and me out of the DEA slammer, and we’d drive home in shame, our heads hanging low as we consider how we were tricked by the Game. Oh, the humanity.
Whew. I think I need to cut down on my morning coffee.
Teen Slang Isn’t That Cool Anymore
I had an interesting conversation with Squirt recently.
ME: You better change your shirt. And when was the last time you washed your hair? Can you get a comb through that? Holy cow, you’re actually going to go out looking like that?
TEEN: (rolling eyes) Jeez, Mom! Have another sip of the hatorade!
Excuse me? Sip of the hatorade?
This phrase was obviously meant to shut the recipient up. It worked very well on me because my brain simply could not absorb it. If I’d been in a Star Trek episode I would’ve been vibrating in confusion until I pitched forward onto the kitchen table in a major hard disk failure.
I guess it’s time to admit I’m having language difficulties with Squirt and Tiger (ages 14 and 16). At least when we were kids, slang made sense. Not today—the kids of today don’t know any better, poor things.
Back when I was a kid if I said something was “cool,” Mom could at least figure out that it was a positive term, because the word “cool” implied something desireable.
After all, cool weather is good. Cool mints are refreshing. Being “calm, cool and collected” is admirable.
You see? Perfectly logical. Our slang made sense.
But today, oy, today. I just get used to idiocies like “dope,” as in
Man, that car is so dope.
which means
My, that car is so beautiful, even I would be proud to drive it, which is really something, considering how I hate everything in my current teenager state of being.
And now they’ve gone and switched the slang on me so I can’t even understand that pitiful little piece of information. What used to be dope is now sick. As in,
Man, that car — it’s sick.
It means exactly the same thing as the dope translation above, but is fiendishly designed to speed up a mom’s hard disk failure.
Which brings me back to the hatorade. I didn’t suffer hard disk failure—I survived, because I have tools in my arsenal Mom never even dreamed of: I looked it up on the internet.
1. Hatorade
a figurative drink a hater may thirst for and share. Generally used when someone hops on the bandwagon to hate on someone or something. – same word different spelling (haterade)
Tim must’ve had a tall glass of hatorade, cause he went off on that new Usher trax.
So aha! Now I understand. Squirt felt I was overly critical of his “look.” Why didn’t he just say so?
And now I discover there’s a new term sniffing around our teenagers in the hopes one of them will take it home: “It’s the sex.”
This is a phrase guaranteed to make a mom clutch her heart and pitch over lifeless onto the kitchen table no matter how often she checks UrbanDictionary.com.
Lord help us all.
Norman Bates Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, So Get Your Own Towels
Bam! Bam! BAM!
Jeez. Can’t a woman take a shower in peace?
Not if she’s a mother.
“This better be important!” I hollered. “I’m talking blood! Or fire!”
The door pounding stopped and I resumed my shower.
As usual, I can never shower by myself. If it isn’t a knock at the door, it’s one of those noisy split-personality debates Hubby says I should never tell anybody about.
This particular debate was between the Mother and the Woman.
“What if,” asked the Mother, “the pounding stopped because a psychopathic killer entered the house and the child had to run for it?”
The razor skidded to a halt on my knee as I considered this.
“Ha!” snickered the Woman. “More likely the kid remembered you keep the milk in the refrigerator. Or maybe his brother threatened to feed oatmeal to the dog.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” mused the Mother. “Remember reading about that deranged drug-user who broke into a house with a shovel? Thank goodness the parents were home, heard their kids’ cries for help and saved them before he–”
“Come on!” groaned the Woman. “How many times do we have to stop showering, using the toilet or whatever, just so we can answer a pint-sized door pounder who wants to know ‘which is worse, eating a live scorpion or being attacked by killer bees?'”
The Mother chuckled. “Wasn’t that cute! They’re so imaginative, so young, so… defenseless… If there is a psychopath in the house brandishing a large garden tool, they’ll be –”
“They’ll be toast!” blasted the Woman. “Does Peter and the Wolf ring a bell? I refuse to answer that door! They’ve cried wolf too many times.”
“How cruel you are,” sniffed the Mother. “All you care about is shaving these legs which, by the way, have proven time and time again that they reforest themselves within 24 hours. But the grief and suffering of a bloody aftermath? That lasts FOREVER.”
When the Woman didn’t respond, the Mother pressed on.
“Interrupt our shower and what have we lost? A minute! But what’s a minute to two small boys, clinging to each other in fear, holding up their little arms in one last, brave effort to deflect the blows of a maniac wielding a pick axe?”
The three of us stumbled over each other in a crazed attempt to get out of the shower and throw on a towel.
“I’m coming, boys!” I cried, unlocking the door and rushing into the empty living room.
“Now that’s just great!” swore the Woman. “Just clue Mr. Maniac into the fact that you’re here!”
“No gore on the walls or the carpet,” whispered the Mother. “That’s a good sign.”
I grabbed my son’s chess trophy off the piano and crept up the stairs, my eye on the closed bedroom door.
It was too quiet. Throwing all caution downstairs, I burst through their door.
The boys looked up at me from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“Yeah, Mom?”
The Mother sighed in relief. The Woman slapped her forehead in disgust.
“Who,” I asked through gritted teeth, “pounded on my door?”
They looked confused. Then the oldest brightened.
“Oh! That was me, Mom. I needed some underwear but then I realized you were taking a shower so I looked in my drawer and found some.”
“Hey, Mom!” said my youngest, poking at my shin with his index finger. “You got shaving cream all over your legs!”
As I embarked upon one of my loudest lectures (entitled, “Why We Save Pounding on a Locked Bathroom Door for Emergencies, Unless We Want to Hear a Lot of French”) the Mother began another internal debate.
“What if–”
“Oh, shut up!” snapped the Woman.
Stray Cat Struts His Stuff
“Lookin’ good, baby,” said the hunk, but not to me.
I hadn’t visited Las Vegas since the 80s. Back then, Duran Duran was hungry like the wolf and this pool-side stud guzzled his bottles as fast as I could hand them to him.
A lot changes in 18 years.
“Baby, c’mere and meet my aunt. She changed my diapers.”
Meet my nephew, the Wolf. And that was supposed to be my line, but somehow it didn’t sound as funny as it did when I said it.
Grumbling, I smeared on 50+ sunscreen while Wolfie continued his running commentary on the prospective conquests floating by in rental tubes.
“Oh, yeah! Looking fine, baby. Come to ME, baby!”
It was hard to take him seriously, seeing as how I knew him when he barely came to my kneecap. But this boy wasn’t just talking big. Women were clutching at his trawling line as if it was a life preserver and they were going under for the third time.
“See that sexy older babe over there?” Wolfie sucked his breath through his teeth. “We went out last night. ”
I put on my prescription sunglasses to better examine this cradle-robbing senior. When I focused, I gasped. Older women were supposed to be… older… than me. But this gal was thirty if she was a day, and had a body that qualified her for Baywatch duty.
She smiled and winked at Wolfie.
“She’s twenty-eight,” he said reverently as he waved back. “She knows a lot.”
Sipping my mineral water, I carefully noted her leopard-print bikini, her deep, golden tan, her gravity-defying… Thompson Twins… just in case I needed to pick her out of a lineup of child predators.
“Yeah,” Wolfie added meaningfully, doing that breath thing again with his teeth, “I took her back to my room last night.”
The mineral water burst out of my nose. “You what!”
He frowned. “But Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me keep her.”
“Well, she’s not a lost kitten, for crying out loud!”
“No, she’s a German kitten. And in Germany, older kittens appreciate younger men.”
If any more kittens appreciated this young man he’d be classified as a Pet Shop Boy. “Do they appreciate getting tossed out of hotel rooms?”
Wolfie sighed, no doubt wishing he could get his money for nothing and his chicks for free. But Mom and Dad were paying for this trip.
“Oh, baby,” he suddenly said, and not to me. “You da bomb! Bomb, baby!”
Bomb Baby whipped around, her hands planted firmly on what couldn’t been more than 33-inch hips as she disdainfully surveyed the dude who dared lay lustful eyes upon her. Her eyes narrowed dangerously and I ducked.
Wolfie intensified his monologue. “Oh, yeah, baby, bomb! You vain, baby. You something else.” Not only was he disposing of all conventional verbs, he was growling. “Come on, baby, turn around! Gimme a look at that prime merchandise.”
“Stop it!” I hissed from under People’s “Where are they now?” section, where my zinc-oxided nose was smearing Boy George’s makeup.
“Oh, yeah, you fine! You bomb!” Wolfie threw back his head and howled.
I grabbed my towel, ready to run.
But Bomb Baby didn’t attack. Her head and shoulders began to bob, like one of those toy dogs in the rear windows of cars. A sly smile spread over her lips.
Wolfie’s head bobbed up and down, too. Bomb Baby bobbed. Wolfie bobbed. For a moment I was confused. Didn’t I just see this on Animal Planet?
Then Bomb Baby slowly turned and began to walk away, all of her bob-bob-bobbing along as she gave Wolfie the requested scenery.
“Oooohhh!” he moaned, “Oh, yeah. Ohhh yea-AAAAAGH!”
He fell back on his chaise lounge, spent.
“Are you through?” I snapped. “Do you want a cigarette?”
He popped up again. “You are so funny, Aunt Bonnie. You know I don’t smoke. But–” he used the tone he used when he was six and wanted a Popsicle from the ice cream truck, “how ’bout a beer?”
I didn’t care if the 80s were long gone. The only bottle I’d let this cub guzzle was root beer.