Although it’s been said many times, many ways…

(Image: Currier & Ives, 1876)

You may have noticed that I have taken a bit of a “Pogging Pause” (PP) in recent weeks. Mega hi-tech equation: end-of-the-semester academia chaos + procrastination on making/buying of Christmas gifts + the earlybird birth of my impossibly cute niece & nephew (!!) = an epidemic known as Unfortunate Pog Deficiency (UPD). But I promise I’ll be back very very soon. Just as soon as the cookie coma wears off.

I hope you’re all enjoying the loveliest of holidays (and the yummiest of foods — especially cookies)!

10 Things my mom would say if she walked in my living room right now

ith Christmas looming (TEN FREAKIN’ DAYS, ARE YOU FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME WITH THIS?!), I have entered the annual phase I like to call: MomPrep (MP). There are several components of MP, none of which I care to share with you at this juncture (you’re welcome); however, a residual effect of said MP is that I unfortunately “hear” my mother’s voice in my ear pretty much constantly so that I may begin to anticipate potentially frustrating/enervating/absurd motherly confrontations that would make me want to slam a candy cane up my nose. So to speak. The whole point is: once I can successfully identify Crazy Mom Patterns (CMPs), anticipation and recognition of predictable CMPs will allow me to save myself (and my gram, and my sister if she’s around) and our collective sanity and, therefore, our familial Christmas experience as a whole. So, basically, MP and recognition of CMPs represent the means by which I shall become my own Christmas Savior.

Amen. 

So, as I sit now in my living room, ruminating on this Monday list, with ungraded student papers strewn about and CNN on in the background, I can’t shake my mom’s running commentary. Which really just means that I’m progressing nicely through my MP, don’t you think? Thank you.

Here are 10 things my mom would definitely want to tell me RIGHT NOW (because nothing can wait with my mom — that’s, like, step 1 of MomPrep.): 

1.) “I like what you’ve done with the place. It looks cute. But… (adjusts plant-lamp ratio on end table) … there, that’s better.”

2.) “Wow, you’ve received a lot of Christmas cards… (goes to mantle and pretends to read/appreciate the cards… thinks I do not notice when she “fixes” the card order). Very nice.”

3.) “What’s that bright orange ticket sticking out of your mail file?” (umm, a parking ticket that is 99% hidden behind other envelopes, thereby further proving the existence of Mom-(ra)Dar)

4.) “Have you paid all your bills this month?” (yes.) “HOW have you paid all your bills this month? Do you still owe a bunch of money on your credit cards?” (ugh.)

5.) “Are all those papers graded?” (no.) “Well don’t you think you should stop typing and watching Larry King and get them graded? Aren’t grades due on Wednesday? Isn’t it going to take you a long time? How long does it take you to grade one paper? Why have you waited this long to start grading them when you only have a little over a day? Come on… how long have you been in school and teaching? You’d think that over a decade in higher education would teach you a thing or two about procrastination.” (you’d think.) *note: notice that my mom strings along a ton of questions without a break for me to have a chance to answer. This is a common CMP.

6.) “Why do you have my wedding picture hidden in the corner behind your coat rack? You can barely see it!” (umm… because, I don’t know, I guess, for some reason, I thought that maybe a photo of you with step-dad #3 could be viewed as an optional design feature that probably wouldn’t gel with the overall comforting aesthetic that I’ve tried to create for myself in MY HOME.)

7.) “And why do you have that horrible, old picture of me and your father on your bookshelf where everyone can see it?” (umm…)

8.) “Are you still seeing that guy who’s friends with your good friend?” (no.) “Well, what happened? I thought you really liked him? Do you think you’ll get back together.” (NO.) “Why not?” (ugh.)

9.) “I know you don’t have much money, so why don’t you just make Step-Dad#3 and me something for Christmas?” (because I almost feel more pressured to make you something?) “Well, Jesus, I’m trying to help you here. Fine, then spend $20 or $25 on us, tops.” (gee, thanks.)

10.) “You spend an awful lot of time on that computer. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get paid for it? Have you still been looking for a part-time job? Have you called the temp agency? Do you know for sure if your Writing Fellowship will be renewed next year? because, if it’s not, that means you need to look for a full-time job, have you thought of that? and if you have a full-time job, how will you find the time to write your dissertation? and you need to finish your dissertation. What are you going to do???” (*coma ensues*)

Yeah… definitely still a lot of work to do in my MomPrep before I hit the road on Sunday. 

Think happy thoughts, please. And I will think happy thoughts for all of you and your family (dys)functions this holiday season.

GLORY TO ANNA IN THE HIGHEST!

It’s a handmade Christmas!

ell, after much back-and-forthing, I decided to make my own holiday cards after all… sponsored by The Paper Source, Briarpress.org, and my trusty Scotch Craft Stick.

Most of my near-and-dear ones will receive them tomorrow, so I figure I’m not ruining any top-secret info or anything.

Here’s a little sampling:

15 December associations I tend to make

1. December = the smell of pine, which is mildly orgasmic. For me, anyway. Lucky me.

2. December = Egg Nog Shakes at McDonald’s. Other than the Shamrock Shake for St. Patrick’s Day (and the sadly fleeting Arctic Orange Shake, which I haven’t seen since my adolescence), the Egg Nog Shake encompasses McDonald’s best achievement. I mean, other than that whole Super Size Me thing.

3. December = SNOW HATS. Snow hats provide me with infinite comfort and protection from the elements. And by “elements,” I mean, well, everything. Truth of the matter is, I’ve been known to wear a snow hat even during the summer months. Whenever I feel like I need some heavy-duty protecting, the snow hat is there for me. The snow hat does not discriminate by season. The snow hat loves me, unconditionally. I love you, snow hat.

4. December = Andes mints. I’ve been to Peru, but I didn’t see any mint. What I did see, though, were mountains of sheer awesomeness. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that the extensive South American mountain range produces this smoothest of chocolatey-minty decadence all wrapped in a thinly veiled, metallic-green wrapper. One love, Andes. One love.

5. December = A Charlie Brown Christmas. You’ve probably noticed that I’m sort of a Peanuts fan. Pretty much no holiday would be complete for me without Vince Guaraldi’s accompaniment and that spotted beagle jigging around. But A Charlie Brown Christmas takes Charles Schultz’s brilliance to a whole other level: not only do the Peanuts characters make an impressive statement about the over-commercialization of Christmas and holiday depression, but they also take part in this incredible dance number that could put all Dancing With the Stars coaches to shame. For real. That kid in green was doing the Running Man before the RUNNING Man was doing the Running Man! And the mohawked dude in orange had some crazy-@ss double-jointedness happening with his shoulder that remains inexplicably innovative. I mean, you try that sh*t!

6. December = unfortunate and excessive lawn ornamentation (particularly the blow-up variety), which serves as a physical manifestation of the yard owner’s insatiable need to be coddled and also his/her inability to streamline. The result is terrifying and nightmare-inducing. See my previous pog. 

7. December = boots that inevitably make my socks fall down inside of them and, therefore, drive me insane. Thanks a lot, boots.

8. December = homemade Christmas gifts when I’m too poor to buy any. Which I am every this year. I hope my gram likes her homemade family tree this year.

9. December = crazy fabric wreath that my maintenance dude always hangs up on my porch, which leads neighbors (and fellow tenants) to believe that I have masterfully bogus holiday decorating taste, which is CLEARLY not true. I mean, come on. I have nothing against fabric wreaths, mind you. I am all about the handmade. Still, just because I support handmades doesn’t mean all handmades are good. It’s sort of like how, in the past, my family would just buy me anything they saw that had any French language on it. Including a Celine Dion CD. Their logic being: she likes French, Celine speaks French; thus, she must like Celine. Umm… faulty syllogism, family members. Likewise, Maintenance Dude’s fabric wreath has no relevance to anything even remotely pleasing — to the eye, or otherwise. It’s sort of like your old elementary schoolteacher’s tacky holiday sweater barfed a wreath. So, I let the fabric pseudo-creation have its day (or ten), and then I stealthily swipe it off its hook and stash it in the shed… until Maintenance Dude resuscitates the wreath next year. It’s this little game Maintenance Dude and I like to play. Four years and it hasn’t gotten old yet.

10. December = 10.5-hour trek to Ohio to see family and friends for the holidays. Always therapeutic and often amusing (what with my various interpretations of Broadway show-tunes, first in a French accent, then in a British accent, then in a Pakistani accent, then as my mom, etc.), the drive from Boston to Cleveland has become almost automatic by now. Which just seems wrong, doesn’t it? Ten and a half hours of wrongness.

11. December = birthdays. Lots of good friends with birthdays this month. Yeah, Scotty and Denise, I’m looking directly (and accusingly) at you two. I’m sure you’ve gotten the shaft over the years because, let’s face it, birthdays around Christmas pretty much equate to “combined present,” and that just blows. Sometimes quantity is better than quality, ya know? So I feel pressured to get you two separate gifts (or more), and to make them awesome and meaningful, first as a birthday gift, then as a Christmas gift. And it’s so hard to decide which gift equals birthday and which gift equals Christmas, so I ultimately end up in a near-catatonic state, choking on my own saliva. Umm… as opposed to someone else’s saliva? I don’t know. But it’s not pretty. So… thanks a lot. Way to be born during the holiday season. Poor planning. Your parents’ libidinal clocks BLEW. And you can tell them I said so.

12. December = holiday hours. And holiday hours RULE. Not even because I necessarily want to go Christmas/birthday shopping at 10pm, but it’s nice to know that, should the urge pinch me, I could hop in my really loud car, barrel past a ton of scary-@ss blow-up ornaments that have no business infiltrating my field of vision, and go buy my friend a Homer Simpson Chia-Pet. Awesome. 

13. December = my gram. Gram comes to visit us from South Carolina each Christmas. Ninty-years-old, and the woman still mows her lawn and landscapes. In pumps. STEP OFF. Gram is my favorite person in the world. No contest. And I usually see her at least a few times a year, but… Christmastime is always the most special, because it always equates to literal and figurative strolls down memory lane, made even more poignant by the surroundings: my Gram was born in Cleveland, just as I was. I love asking her questions and hearing her stories. Like when she first went out with my grandfather: she was a bookish high schooler, waiting outside her house for a blind date to arrive and pick her up. Only he was late. And the next thing she knew, here came my grandpa, sidling up  in a convertible with a friend of his. He made some comment about how Gram’s prospective date must have been “a real louse” (or some other such groovy term), and that she should get in the car and go out with him instead. And so she did. And they were married four years later. Studs.

14. December = advent calendars, which I will relish till I’m old and decrepit. You should probably check out my other blog for crafty examples of advent awesomeness.

15. December = CHRISTMAS COOKIES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Enough said.

 

The neighbors have way too many blow-up decorations. And other Tuesday randomness.

o you guys have one of those neighbors who obsessively switches out lawn ornaments the second one holiday ends? For real, it was like the neighbors had supersonic radar and, right as I finished my last bite of pumpkin pie with massive Cool Whip towers, they instantly flicked on the blinding lights of their Outdoor Christmas Festival-of-Freakiness (OCF-F). It’s like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon fornicated with Father Christmas and birthed a yard. But the worst part is that their yard’s not even that big. We’re talkin’, maybe 20′X20′, tops. And you bet your sweet A that every freakin’ millimeter of innocent green space has been tarnished by electricity-wasting, blow-up, eye-gashing ridiculousness. The Clark Griswold lighting display? Yeah, that craziness doesn’t hold a freakin’ candle to the theme park goin’ on in my neighbor’s yard. Here is a rough-sketch of the neighbor’s OCF-F:

Blow-up carousel on the right, blow-up teeter-totter with blow-up animals teeter-tottering in the center, blow-up ferris wheel with blow-up animals ferris wheeling on the left, 2 or 3 random non-blown up deer that look like they’re made of wicker and totally don’t fit the blow-up scheme of the yard-from-hell. Oh, and then there’s a blow-up Satan Santa & Mrs. Claus that stand unsettlingly tall and guard the oddly tame front porch. Which, really, if anything needs to be guarded, it’s the blow-up blitzkrieg taking place on their lawn.

Anyway. So that’s the neighbor’s yard. Which is really fun to make fun of, but even funnier to see in person. I’ll have to take a picture and post it… Stay tuned.

In other news, it’s time for Christmas card-sending, which is, like, one of my favorite activities of the year. Usually I plan weeks in advance and shop around at several of my favorite stationery stores (read: Paper Source, Bob Slate, a bunch of Etsy sites, etc.) to find the awesomest cards possible. This year, however, like most people, I’m struggling a bit. So… I’m debating making my own cards instead. But I’ve checked out some supplies and, once it’s all said and done and I’ve bought all the necessary components, I’m really not sure if it would be any cheaper? And it would clearly be more time-consuming. A good kind of time-consuming but… time-consuming nonetheless. And I’m a teacher and it’s the end of the semester, and… well, it’s a scary time for us teachers, ya know? But it’s so fun to make cards… hmm… see, my main concern is that I’ll get all excited about making the cards and become all obsessive about it, and then I’ll sideline my grading and end up staying up until the butt-crack of dawn to get my grades in on time or something. Not like I’ve ever experienced that before or anything.

hee hee

Anyway, if any of you guys have any suggestions about inexpensive cardmaking supplies and where to find ‘em, please Please PLEASE chime in! And maybe I’ll even send you one (if I end up making them)!

Happy Tuesday. Check out some other Tuesday Randomness, courtesy of the Un-Mom, here:

Sincerely,
No Longer-Too-Much-of-a-Debbie Downer (I hope)

ps) I’m obsessed with owls. Please see the images I posted on the right of my page and enjoy Jon Carling’s awesomeness.

Random Tuesday Thoughts (not to be confused with my random EVERYDAY thoughts)

ecause Anna’s Listless Mondays have proven to be so utterly spanktastic, I thought I’d go ahead and tap into the Un-Mom’s wellspring of weekly Random Tuesday Thoughts. I mean, the case could certainly be made that randomness-of-thought does not discriminate by day of the week. I’m pretty sure my thoughts will be just as random tomorrow as they are today — perhaps even more random. It’s like a fun little surprise, really. However, because the Un-Mom has officially designated Tuesday as Grand Central Station for my random, directionless trains of thought, well… it’s kinda like an extra heaping spoonful of peanut butter sauce on my Friendly’s Reese’s Pieces Sundae of perfection.

A.K.A., it freakin’ rocks. Hardcore.

So, here goes… my inaugural:

Wait a second. Can I list my random thoughts? Or does the very essence of “listing” de-randomize the randomness? Sh*t. Does the very fact that I’m even thinking about listing random thoughts (oxymoron?) prove my analness? anality? analiciousness? Whoa. OK, the “-licious” suffix should never find itself adjacent to an “anal.” My bad. I totally just grossed myself out. But anyway, hey, this is my inaugural go at this RTT stuff, so… I can make it up as I go along, right? Right.

1) I just got done watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and all that sticks with me is: WHAT THE F*CK DID THEY DO TO THE VOICES?!? The only one that sounded authentic was the voice-over-the-phone going “WAWA-WA-WA-WAWA.” All the others sounded like the b@stard step-children of the originals. Not that there’s anything wrong with b@stard step-children, but… just don’t go stickin’ your voice in my Peanuts characters, got it?

 B) It’s amazing how soap opera world only progresses about one day in two months’ time, yet tabloid world seems to progress two months in one day’s time. Case in point: just yesterday I pogged about Heidi & Spencer eloping in Cabo. Then, this morning I wake up to Perez spouting sh*t about Speidi setting the whole thing up with US Weekly in typical fame whore fashion, and that they’re not technically married at all. Dude, whatever. I give you 6 months, regardless.

III) My scalp’s ridiculously dry. Like, way past Head-’n-Shoulders dry. Maybe approaching Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club dry. OK, I just grossed myself out again.

D) Who are these nutjobs that go to Kohl’s at 4am the day after Thanksgiving?!? (A.K.A., Black Friday) Well, OK, in the past, my sister has been one of those nutjobs. But then she came to her senses. 

5) I just got done watching “The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the Reunion Special” on Bravo, and I have to say that it totally met all cracked-out expectations. But don’t worry, I switched between Atlanta pseudo-reality and CNN in a (vain?) attempt to reach some sort of mixed medium utopia world — half fake, half “real”…. I don’t know. But it’s pretty d@mn funny to hear “Oh, HELLLLL no!” juxtaposed with Wolf Blitzer’s mind-numbing “uhh”s. John King and his Magic Wall sort of clinch that psychedelic otherworld deal. ps) Nene’s cropped haircut looks annoyingly good. I wish I could pull that sh*t off.

VI) My students and I are now discussing The Bell Jar. It’s either my fourth or fifth time reading it. But, amazingly, the increasing number of reads doesn’t make it any less potent for my psyche. We’ll see how this goes. I don’t think I’ve ever read it around Christmas before. Maybe egg nog will help to sideline the SP-induced crazies (*note: I’m referring to Sylvia Plath, though Sarah Palin does still drive me crazy in an entirely other capacity).

G) What’s the deal with the vampire bullsh*t?

8 ) I really miss Paris. I really miss WALKING in Paris. I miss the smell of the metro, which wasn’t even pleasant. But it was the metro. And it was mine for a time. And I miss the aroma of freshly baked baguettes at 6am, wafting out of the boulangerie below my studio. And I’m not even a morning person. But baguettes can wake me up any day.

IX) OK, I guess I’m done for now. Except I really wish I could find some part-time employment. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve done freelance writing, I’ve done translations, I’ve done tutoring, I can calligraphy, I can type super freakin’ fast… it would be really lovely if somebody hired me and offered me more than $6/hour to do something. But, you know, not the whole Ashley Dupré “something.” OK, shameless plug over.

Say goodbye to the random thoughts for now.

Goodbye, random thoughts.