Scraps of Crap, Chunks of Junk & Bits of Wit from the Sea of Debris

"I love the smell of french fries in the afternoon!" Katy said that today after we drove through Chick-Fil-A. She must've heard a similar quote in some kids' TV show or movie. She was serious and had no idea why I thought it was funny. I thought about explaining the original "Napalm in the morning" quote from Apocalypse Now, but blew it off.

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I'm having a hard time with Tim Russert's death. I won't bother saying everything everyone else has already said about him. I knew this election was going to suck, but in his absence it will suck without enthusiasm. I hate curveballs like this. When Harvey Korman died a few weeks ago, I observed a personal moment of silence, and then moved on after making a mental note to watch Blazing Saddles again soon. Harvey was old. He was supposed to die. We all know that God can push his smite button at any time, but we never cease to be shocked and feel cheated when it happens to someone we come to depend on, someone who really wasn't done with all the things they (and we) thought they needed to do. This reminds me, I should really get my affairs in order.

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Here's a quote from an E-mail I just received from my sister:

Okay, better go get on with another great dog day of summer and oh the joy it brings me to hear my children with soft voices of angels chirping in my ear almost in unison, "Mom, I'm bored." It is music to my worn out, beat down, frazzled ears. It lifts me up and gives me a second wind to keep going, keep trudging on in the vast jungle of motherhood. Oh the rewards of being a mother. Just knowing that in all my sacrifice, all the debt we go into, just to provide them with another Webkin, every ounce of weight I have packed on to this tired and weary body, every varicose vein, stretch mark and C-section scar, my dark roots from not having a minute to make a hair appointment, my crooked back, my permanent cricked neck, my unshaved legs, and unflossed teeth. All so I can see these sweet, adorable faces look at me and say with heartfelt emotion, "I'm bored." I must say, these are the little gems I never bargained for that dreadful night of conception.

I hope she'll continue to allow me to quote her. She has such a poetic way of summing everything up. In fact, anything original that anyone sends me will be showcased here if it makes me laugh out loud. Sure, I'm easily amused. But that will just increase your chances of publication.

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I haven't been able to remember most of my dreams lately, and the ones I do remember are not often appropriate for sharing. But last night I dreamt I saved Luke from a bear. This is no doubt because on Sunday, he left for Boy Scout camp for a week. He has never been away from home this long. He's only 11. It's just Tuesday and I can already feel my anxiety mounting. I forgot to put a helmet on him and cover him with bubble wrap before he left. Who will put sunscreen on him? Who will cut his fingernails? Who will tell him to brush his teeth, comb his hair, blow his nose, and change his underwear?

In my dream, this huge black bear tackled me from behind. His paws left puncture wounds in my shoulders. I then made sure to show the scars to everyone I encountered. I love how dreams can gather such a random assortment of people in one place. I saw friends from high school, a college boyfriend, James Carville (or someone equally scary-looking, like Alan Colmes), Haley Joel Osment (the "I see dead people" kid), and the professor from Gilligan's Island. I think Mary Ann may have been there, too. Did I expose my injuries so people would see how brave I was? So people would feel sorry for me? Is this a symptom of my open-book life? Sharing too much in my ongoing effort to feel connected and force that connection upon others? If I found myself interesting enough, I might delve further into this topic. Fortunately for both of us, I find self-introspection somewhat counterproductive, and in my case, paradoxically, both scary and slumber-inducing.

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Another event to add to the list of deployment-related mishaps: Katy managed to lose her $800 neon-pink retainer. We know that it went missing at a friend's house. I'm sure it will turn up now that it has been replaced at the discounted cost of $350. The new, improved retainer glows in the dark. This will make it easy to find next time it gets lost. At night. I am a little nervous about my daughter going around with something glow-in-the-dark in her mouth. Have they tested these retainers on mice? If the old retainer does show up, it better be in their dog's poop, mangled in the garbage disposal, run over in the driveway, or in some other nasty place that would have still demanded replacement.

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Some more words that are fun to say: mausoleum, vanquish, parabola, trapezoid, rhombus, parallelogram, albino, sycophant, tureen, ratatouille, bouillabaisse, gazpacho, Tigris, Euphrates, Madagascar, Burma, Persia, Polynesia, Micronesia, amnesia, Saskatchewan, Timbuktu.

A couple of old-people words that bother me: high-falutin' and malarkey. Malarkey is kind of like cockamamie which is already on the list. I think malarkey can be cockamamie, but not vice versa. And high-falutin' -- what is falutin' anyway? Did it start out as faluting before those mispronouncin' low-faluters got a hold of it? I'm sure I could look into the etymology (not to be confused with entomology) of this word, but contrary to what my readers might think, I do have a life here.

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So gay people can get married now in California. Can someone please give me a satisfactory explanation as to how this threatens every heterosexual marriage? Haven't the straight people screwed up the institution well enough? I wouldn't be surprised if the gays set a good example of monogamy and fidelity for the rest of us. Hell, they are the ones who want to make their monogamy official. Sure, this may hurt an intolerant person's sensibilities, but isn't that the bigot's problem? What if all blue-eyed people got to eat spaghetti, but it was illegal for all brown-eyed people to eat it? What if all diabetics could go to the bowling alley, but it was illegal for all hypoglycemics? What if people with freckles could drive cars, but people with birth defects had to use tricycles? What if men could vote, but women couldn't? What if people with white skin could sit at the front of the bus, but people born with brown skin had to sit at the back?

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One quick gardening tip: Don't use a big Weed-Eater in a small garden.

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Sometimes I forget that this dictation software I use tries to pick up everything that comes out of my mouth. I have been listening to the Counting Crows radio station I created with Pandora. I just found myself singing one of my favorite songs, Train's Meet Virginia. I just had to delete an entire paragraph of gibberish and put the microphone on pause while I sang the rest of the song.

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One more quick story before I go to bed. First, you have to understand that one of my missions in life is to irritate and/or embarrass my father-in-law at every opportunity. Like the time he picked me up at the airport one pre-9/11 October 31. I think it must have been in 2000. He had been waiting at the gate, bragging to a friend about his intelligent and attractive daughter-in-law, looking forward to introducing me. So here I come with my perennial Halloween Bubba teeth protruding from my mouth. He was sufficiently humiliated, and we all got a good laugh out of it. Now, as you may be aware, I have a reputation for taking any inappropriate or crude reference that someone might make and pushing it right over the edge. I pride myself on my ability to take something that is merely in poor taste and turn it into something obscenely vulgar. It is the only form of one upmanship that I have ever been able to engage in successfully. So my in-laws were in town a couple of weeks ago. They took me and the kids out to dinner. We were planning the yard work for the next day. My father-in-law asked, "Who is going to hoe the garden?" When he said the word hoe, he looked at me as if to say, "Please don't make any references." Katy helpfully reminded us that there was already a hose in the garden. He explained to her what a hoe was, and again gave me that look. So of course I said, "I'll be the hoer. I'm a little out of practice, but I used to be pretty good at it." He shook his head, thinking, "I knew it, there she goes…" So he said to me, "Jill … I'm gonna have to spank you when we get home." Poor choice of words on his part. He had to leave the table momentarily after I responded, "I charge $20 extra for that."