Sad State

My head is infected. This is the final production of hurricane Gustav in my life. The infection became so bad that by Friday pus had began to seep from my piercing whole. Good times. The Sig is also infected, but his is a viral infection. He just could not understand why I got worse instead of better after my initial trip to the doctor well that is what happens when you disobey the doctors orders. So in the future when they tell me to rest you can bet I will not be running from the moment my feet hit the concrete. Although all of this rest is already making me a little nutty.

I was doing our weekly grocery shopping earlier (a task normally done by the whole family). It was strange walking through the aisle all by my onesies, sick and desperate to get out as quickly as possible. I found myself forgetting and remember a million little things and running back and forth with each one. I was all over that store in the least efficient shopping trip imaginable! Normally our grocery store is very mellow, a complete opposite of Wal-Mart. The food is a little higher but the quality is better, the stores are cleaner and less crowded, and the people are friendlier. Well, normally that is. On this excursion of inefficiency I noticed brats littering the store, screaming and pulling things off of the shelves, beeping horns, and demanding items and candy from their all to wishy-washy parents. It was everything that I could do to stop myself from picking these children up and using them to club their moronic paternal unit upside the head. For the life of me I will never understand why such a lazy society is so intent on breeding. Am I the only one that has noticed the connection between the people with the three to eight screaming kids and the people that want a hand out when ever possible? Parenthood is not easy, trust me, my son carries around a stuffed penguin that he dresses up like a doll and has lengthy conversations with, but if you put the work in then it is worth it. I am not embarrassed by my child, in fact I am generally all over very proud, and that does not mean that his attitude or demeanor were just handed to us. Oh lucky us, we have the worlds most well behaved perfect child at all times and we have done nothing…yeah RIGHT! I could fill a book with the things that my kid has attempted or managed to pull, and he is not even six. The book would be titled Five Years from Freedom and the highlight would be when he threw up in The Sig’s mouth. Ah, now THAT is parenthood, nothing easy there. But like anything else the outcome is what makes it all worth it. On the week ends we do our weekly shopping as a family, and I have never been embarrassed by my child’s behavior. Normally we end up in rather interesting discussions about the working of things, bugs, or the creation of the universe and evolution. I end the trip not in a daze, stressed, or ashamed, but laughing or at the very least smiling. I do not normally wander aimlessly through the aisle wanting to cry in confusion or pain either, but I blame the infection for that today. I also blame it for making me forget my tortillas.

Damn infection, I wanted those tortillas.

75% Stupid

I was driving with the Sig talking about the approaching hurricane when I made an off the hand comment on all of the fake storm windows on houses in our area. I always find it amusing when I notice something and then I can not unnoticed it. You would think that in the area that we live in the storm shutters would be real, like they were when plantations were here, but nooooo not the bright bulbs around here. Do they learn from history? Nope they just throw up some fake plywood shutters for decoration and bolt them down to the side of the house, you know, because that makes sense. After driving from my in laws house to my sons school I realized that about 75% of the houses have fake storm shutters and maybe two out of every hundred have real ones. Welcome to hurricane central home of the cheap and the stupid. My favorite though has to be the trailers with fake storm shutters…very intelligent.

Well, shutters aside we are pretty well prepared at our place for Gustav and Hanna, and no worries my friends. If it gets bad my little family is heading north. Until then it will be interesting.

Phenomenon

So there haven’t been any recent sightings of Elvis. I wonder what happened to him. It could just be me though, I can not remember the last time I glanced at a tabloid magazine in the line at the super market. That is how I kept my Elvis knowledge up to date after all. Still I was beginning to feel like the tabloids were letting me down a little, gone are the days of Elvis, alien children, and three headed chickens. Those great stories were replaced by more celebrity sleaze. How ever it could not be just the regular who slept with who, no it has to be over the top, since it is a tabloid after all. I feel slightly betrayed. Maybe that in itself is why I have not seen any Elvis news, maybe that is why I have not noticed the tabloids at all, it all just blends together these days. I did how ever see a magazine calling a actress over weight when she could have only weighed 130lbs at the most. It made me want to vomit.

Speaking of the wacky, has anyone else been as amused by this Bigfoot nonsense in the news as I have? The DNA evidence came back from the labs and apparently it belongs to a opossum. Not that much of a difference right? I mean anyone could confuse the two. Both live in the woods. Both are fuzzy. Hehehe, the autopsy results are still pending, and I can not wait. After all anyone that has followed my writing knows that out of all of the mythological creatures Bigfoot is the only one that really unnerves me. I think that the reasoning behind it is simple enough, we do not know enough about Bigfoot for me to feel confident enough on how to kill it should I need to. Vampires, mummies, zombies, I am all over those, Bigfoot…not so much. Maybe I should go and observe so opossums, I could collect some new data.

A Ticket to Hell has Never Been Funnier

If hell actually exists I am probably going there. I always use to joke around about going to hell, but I never put any stock behind it. On the whole I try to be a good person, and not just to the people around me but also to strangers. I do not do it for ‘good points’ or anything like that, I just do it because I want to do what I can to make the world a little better. Anyway, back to the subject of me going to hell… So I was cracking up over a very un-PC joke that The Sig made yesterday, and trust me when I say that though The Sig is not a racist or insensitive person with the way he jokes sometimes it would make you wonder. He’s kind of like Carlos Mencia, but as a white guy it doesn’t quite work out as well for him. He horrified a co-worker of mine once because I mentioned that midst joke he called me a ‘soggy-cracker’ personally I thought the term was hilarious and pretty original. I mean half Mexican half White, soggy-cracker, pretty clever, my co-worker didn’t think it was funny however. Like I said she was horrified, I had to explain that he had a very quirky sense of humor. However as I was tearing up with laughter yesterday I thought to myself about how many people would frown at us at that moment because they lacked senses of humor, and that made me come back to the question if a higher power exists can take a joke? I have always held a strong ‘yes’ to both of those, how ever I have to wonder. I think the strange whacked out beliefs I do have are falling under question yet again. I guess this is what you would call a crisis of faith, not religious, but definitely spiritual. I have felt this crisis threatening for about a month now, since that terrible accident on the eighth took a very important person from my life. Who knew that it would take The Sig and I laughing at the short bus to really bring it crashing down on me. Some people turn to religion in their times of trial, like my mom, she has gone completely ‘end of the world is upon us’ Christian. I have never been one of those people. I do not agree with organized religions at all, but I do have my own beliefs, and at the moment I find that they are all being called into question. Interesting I started this article today with the intention of writing about how I am probably going to be going to hell in a hand basket because the higher power does not have the sense of humor that I suppose, and I end up writing something about a crisis of faith. Hmmm…I think my soul might be a little to heavy for my own good.

Heart Broken

My dad died on the eighth of July. It was a very unexpected and tragic accident at work. I have been spending my time since then trying to take care of my family, particularly my mom and my son. Mom just had to have an emergency surgery, and thank the gods she is healing fast. This is the hardest thing I have ever gone through. My dad was supposed to grow old and crazy and eventually move in with us and drive me crazy with the ‘I told you so’ he should have rightfully delivered when my son became a teenager. This accident was not supposed to happen. I have not written anything because I have nothing to write. Sure life keeps going on, the world keeps turning, but for me I am still trying to find a way to focus on something besides breathing. I still have my sarcastic observations of life and since coming home I have been doing more things then I did before I went back to Arkansas, but I just can not find my spirit. It isn’t dead it just seems to be in retreat for the moment. So I haven’t been writing, but I’m sure that I will again as soon as I can muster the will to do so.

The Fourth

Being a parent is strange sometimes. You find yourself explaining things that you never really thought about explaining before. You know the things we all learn as children and never really put much thought behind who taught us about it since we have known it most of our lives. Well, guess who probably taught us about all of the information that we take for granted? Our parents. This morning while I was fixing breakfast for my son he was telling me about what we are going to do this weekend. While he is going on and on about fireworks and bar-b-ques I notice that he has not mentioned the reason for the celebration at all. So I asked him if he knew why the fourth of July is a holiday in our country. To my amusement he answered, “It’s a holiday this weekend? Wow!” I suppose that in itself not only answered my question but it also summed up the kind of life we give our son. Fireworks + Bar-b-que = Fun Weekend, it does not automatically mean Holiday. Anyway, I digress. So I started to explain to him how our country became a country and how we became a free people. He had some very good and direct questions and I was proud that he really seemed to be grasping the concept of independence. As I went to set his food on the table I noticed he was wearing a troubled expression and so I asked him what he was thinking of. A tip for all future parents…go ahead and ask, but trust me on this, you do not really want to know. The Little Man looked up at me and asked, “Mommy, what was it like working for the king of England?” I mentally cursed the innocence of youth and then explained that we were talking hundreds of years. His response, “Okay, I’ll ask Grandma!” I am sure she’s going to love that one. Happy upcoming Independence Day everyone!

Vivid

My dreams are way to vivid for my own good. What is worse though is that I have an over active imagination. Not like the previous Fish Truck story didn’t give me away on that little secret right? My dreams are also pretty easily influenced, when I’m just riding out the dream, by some event in my life. In last night’s case my dream was influence by this book that I am reading about body snatching aliens that have conquered the human race and the Resident Evil movies. So automatically you would think it is a nightmare, right? Nope. Not this little black duck. It was interesting, I’ll give it that, and definitely more entertaining then other dreams I have had lately but it was not a nightmare. The adrenaline was there, but not the terror. I swear I think there might be a short somewhere in my brain, I do not pause at zombies but the dream where I was abducted from my house and taken to a mall where manikins chased me makes me wake up in a sweat. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Of course that whole dream made me pause with questions, the first, why the hell was I worried about manikins? They are easily broken and I was not that greatly outnumbered. Sure a whole army of zombies I’ll take on with a big crystal candy dish as a weapon, a few living dolls and I run like a track star. Seriously, they need to make help groups for people like me.

We went to see WALL-E last weekend and I can not praise it enough. It is Pixar’s best movie since Finding Nemo. The story is wonderfully heart warming and surprisingly powerful. The animation is not only good but remarkable, especially if you take in to consideration that the movie has no dialogue at all for about half of it and robots have limited facial expressions. That considered, someone deserves a freggin medal for developing characters emotionally binding enough that they almost had me crying. Very few movies have ever been able to make me cry. Seriously, VERY few. When I found myself tearing up over a animated robot I was impressed beyond words. If the tears had actually slipped over the edge I would probably go back and watch it again this weekend. My enjoyment aside though, my son adored it as well. WALL-E is the perfect movie for the entire family and I encourage everyone to go and see it in the theater. After that I am sure that you will choose to own it for yourself once it hits dvd. I know it will be on our shelf.