Gastronomically Rended, And How Are You?

CHOCOLATE CAKE!

Okay, this means nothing but I got your attention...

A lot better than telling you tired and busy reasons for being tired and busy like every other tired and busy person on the tired and busy planet also doing tired and busy things. Plus, chocolate cake...YUM, right?

How often do we say, "I've been so busy."?

Is this a valid excuse anymore? Who isn't busy? Do we throw that out there because we really are tired and busy or because we are too lazy to make conversation? I suspect it's that we don't want to get to chatty with our neighbor dudes because then we can't pound on their door and tell them to quit parking like a beached whale or letting their dog pee in the stairwell. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

How different would our meet and greets go during the day if we answered something other than, "busy" or "tired". I think we should mix it up a bit. Answering an inquiring grocery checker or your neighbor with something new could really make good conversation. "Paradoxical", "Nefarious", or "Dichotomous" work for those wordy, nerdy types. "Gastronomically rended" or "Engorgingly happy" also works, especially on strangers.

Try it and get back to me. Try not to get slapped.

Aside from my alleged bowel pyrotechnics, I had a birthday last week. I had a lovely laid back day with a side of pedi/mani. For someone like me, a frugal soul who shoe shops under spousal threats or goes for a hair trim three times a year, I felt pretty pampered. I got a book (Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell) and Mr. Coffee took me to dinner. I asked for a bouncy castle and a cotton candy machine maker like last year. Then I remembered the bushes on that side of the yard are still reeling from the effects of untimely disgorgement and still sprouting funky colors. And it's not just the evergreens.

To add to my busy-ness, I start Fall semester in about a week. I'm still not full-time and that's why I've been in school since the Industrial Age. I hope to be finished and fully employed in a year and a half. I'm certainly not complaining. I love school and being at home with my kids but also having a plan with an end. End is good. End means a new beginning. And then on with a new plan before my kids graduate from college along side me.

I hope to write again this week despite my nefarious, dichotomous, paradoxical busy-ness. I may even bring chocolate cake. For reals.

-Bee likes her girly nails
Listening to: Where Is The Love by The Black Eyed Peas

Stinkin' Sweet

Today is the first day of the new quarter. I'm excited, of course, but there is always a nagging voice in the back of my head that speaks evil things in my ear while the Evil Inner Me eats donuts.  Donuts are just to throw me off because in my head, Evil Me looks like I did when I was 21, natch, and reverts to acting like a cow sometimes. Insult to injury and all that...

While polishing off a fifth donut, Evil Me declares loudly that I will have to work too hard and will probably qualify for AARP before I graduate.  In contrast, Saintly Me, wants to put Evil Me in her place. Saintly Me wants to give Evil Me a black eye and waive a diploma in her donut stuffing face. It's a rousing fight in my head that would make even Chuck Palahniuk proud.

Saintly Me and Evil Me go rounds every first day back to school. Saintly Me always wins.

Today, I decided I would attempt a go at writing every day. I don't know why I'm announcing this. I probably wont blog again until next year.

In this winter break, I read a lot of books. One of which had only one redeeming merit that has inspired me to ease into my daily blogging with one yucky blucky thing and one good thing for the day we can be thankful for. It's a good way to acknowledge that yes, stink happens but we can end it on a sweet note. It's called Stink and Sweet.

Stink and Sweet Monday Edition:

Technically, the day isn't over but I'll be arranging my erasers by color and labeling my PeeChees tonight so I may not have the time.

STINK: Getting to the bottom of my laundry pile and finding a long lost couch blanket and the Thanksgiving tablecloth. Let's not do the math.

I do laundry every day and have managed to put off the last remnants of my laundry until I can have a full load. If this makes me cheap, whatever. Who runs half a load of wash. This knob on the washer is for decoration and funzies, so we don't feel bad about the environment.

Everyone has something at the bottom of the laundry hamper, be it lego, a silk shirt that you are too cheap to dry clean, or some errant sock or glove. Besides, my mom taught me not to waste energy by running a half load. Peace, love, and recycle. But not put off Thanksgiving linens for a whole month.

Didn't think my Stink would be so literal, did you?

SWEET: The thrill of sleeping in and then going to school to learn about computers makes me stupid happy.

School advisory advised me to take a computer class to avoid taking another year of math. The funny part is this is an entry level computer class to keep from a math class.  I don't see how that computes but I won't complain.


-Bee thinks this is stinkin sweet.
Listening to: It's Time by Imagine Dragons

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School is Hard

Once upon a time, before the last moon, New Moon, full moon, or blue moon, I was born. It wasn’t such an exciting day. You’d think I’d remember it if it was.

Summer in So. California guaranteed that it was hot and muggy and really...my poor mother. Being pregnant in the summer is like swimming while wearing a bear skin rug after downing a bottle of ipecac.

I am a product of an idealistic mom and a carefree dad saying their “I do’s” in front of a preacher 9 months and one day prior to my birth. My entry in this world was scheduled. I like being organized. September baby. On par for the course. Hi, have you met me? I like organizing my organizing books.

That’s not to say that being born under a certain zodiac sign somehow shapes my future or by some cosmic way has predestined my life or character. I am more of the “environment shapes you”, kind of girl. Since a baby in utero is subject to the weather, sounds, and moods of the mother, then it only makes sense that a baby formed during sunshine and spring cleaning takes on common traits. In short, it shouldn’t be startling that Sept babies are organizing, scheduling pseudo-OCD control freaks. Did I mention self-depreciating humor? Yes, that too.

Embracing this year with gusto, I find school dominates my every day. Talking about. Homeworking because. Driving to. Scheduling for. Talking about all of the above when people ask where I have disappeared to. School is some narcissistic way of declaring to the world that I’m smarter than you and I have a GPA to prove it.

Except for Doctors. They can go be smart college grads and make bank because if I'm ever in a car crash, I don’t want Mr. Doyouwantfrieswiththat to do my surgery. Surgery is best taught and learned in the expensive halls of academia.

No one tells you school is expensive. And school is hard. I just want to make sick people better. Or just make sure they aren't shafted by their insurance company. This is why I need to know the head bone is connected to the neck bone. 

Do we consider the ramifications of an astronomical student loan that rivals the yearly income of our post-grad employment? Mixed messages come to us students via email "Congratulations On Your Financial Aid Award". 

 

An award I have to pay back.

Can you imagine a Publisher's Clearing House car unloading, guys get out with balloons and a giant cardboard bill, knocking on a winner's door. The guy answering his door in his wife-beater and slippers is stunned and his smile fades while handed a check that says, "AMOUNT DUE! $40,000.00"?

Ed McMahon is so getting punched in the face.

In school, I earn my bleary eyes and caffeine addictions nestled between slam dunking a test and procrastination. I want the education but when you get down to brass tacks? I go to school for an entirely different reason: the reassurance that I’m not an idiot. 

I fear setting up camp in Idiotville, pop. 1. Being homeschooled had its advantages but it also never gave me the motivation and confidence to continue schooling back when my brain actually remembered things longer than 10 minutes.

As a teen, embarking on another four years living at home, building debt, and naively go on living forever didn’t appeal either. When you are 17, you truly, truly believe you will live forever. Add the violent denial that gravity will adversely affect your person in about ten years and you get exhibit A: Hey, lets skip school, get a big salary job because of my hot, young self and I'm starving. Pass the Cheetos. Everyone looks good at 17.

With ever present certainty, I continue to plod along in school. I continue to fight gravity with push up bras, expanding waistlines with carrot sticks, and brain exercises like long division. And that lipo acid vitamin C stuff that makes airbrushed models look awesome. I endure so that maybe, just maybe, I will find my dream job and won't feel like an idiot.

~Bee would not like fries with that but appreciates the question.

Listening to: Madness by Muse

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There Is Always Room For Pie

I won a book on Goodreads today. Go me!

The whole idea of free books for reviews is almost as good as employment as a dessert taste-tester for The Cheesecake Barn but with less chocolate sauce and far less guilt.

Stretchy pants optional.

No, not pants optional. What kind of girl do you think I am?

Pants, as a rule, should never be optional. Stretchy pants are a different story. As a matter of fact, reading in stretchy pants is highly under-rated. Eating dessert, reading, and drinking coffee in stretchy pants, even more so. Ask anyone who has ever eaten dessert after a Thanksgiving dinner.

"Keep eating. It's tradition...and ignore your Uncle unbuttoning his trousers."

Stretchy pants give you freedom to move, to be active, to go rollerblading with your chocolate lab and allowing as much freedom as a Tampax commercial. Stretchy Pants also support the golden rule.

"There is always room for pie."

No matter how short-short skirts are hemmed or how many skimpy fashions emerge, trends of the publicly* pants-less, and I say this with confidence, is not happening. No Pants-less Day Of The Week will ever go mainstream. Especially when cafe sofa upholstery is involved.

First off? Eww.

Secondly, who says, "Hey, I'm going to get coffee. You wanna go with? Cool. Take off your pants."

Perhaps these words are only spoken in hushed, reverent tones by people who cant wear stretchy pants? It can happen. To be, but stuck...butt stuck, in the traditional confines of non-stretchy pants.

Those poor souls will want pie at Thanksgiving and as a result, realize too late that their ability to sit upright is futile; learning a fatalistic lesson of Supply-Side Economical Effect of Free Price Mechanism meet Laws of Gravity (You Are Now My B##ch Edition).

Commonly known as "I can't believe I ate that whole pie. Where are my stretchy pants?"
 
Just kidding! I know. Eating a whole pie...that'd be silly.  Silly as waxing near mind-grindingly poetic about coffee shops with half-nekkid patrons, sipping scalding hot beverages while lounging in chairs that probably need to be dry cleaned more often than twice a year.

Who knew winning a free book would inspire this nonsense? But yes, Mr Savage. I call him Fred. Or that kid who was sick in Princess Bride. Yes, I have on stretchy pants and it is a kissing book.

~Bee supports The Golden Rule.
Listening to: Slip by Deadmau5

 

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*or if it may interest you wordsmithies, the dictionary advises the lesser-known alternative, yet equally acceptable spelling of "publically" which looks too much like "pubically" and that's just wrong.