It's business time!
I'm in the Admiral's Club Lounge at JFK, about to embark on the Manager Mom 2008 West Coast Business Tour. THREE cities. FOUR airlines. Infinite airplane misery. (Hi there, Herbietown! I'm feeling your pain, my brother.)
As I left my house at 4:30 A.M, (yes, I said A.M., because that's what I had to do to get the cheapest airfare, and I hope those sadists in our Travel & Expense Department get a horribly disfiguring skin rash) I saw that our local Greek Orthodox church was setting up their summer carnival.
Naturally, this makes me think of having illicit sex with random strangers.
Er, from a THEORETICAL, not a PRACTICAL, point of view, said the happily-married-for-nine-years mother of two who will spend the next several days attending an "innovation conference."
Why is this the case? Because in my late college years, when my friends and I got tired of getting groped and thrown up on by drunken frat guys (which more or less resembles my experience at a typical kid birthday party nowadays), we started having movie nights.
We'd gather in someone's apartment with a few cases of Schaefer Light, a fine brew whose 24-pack at $1.99 pack price point made their marketing tagline ("When You're Planning On Having More Than One, Make It A Schaefer") more of a personal challenge. Then we'd pop This Is Spinal Tap into the Betamax and spend the rest of the evening eating Tastykake Cupcakes and reciting lines of dialogue along with the TV.
But one day, my best friend happened to bring over a movie called Two Moon Junction. It stars Sherilynn Fenn as a proper Southern debutante who gets swept away by her passion for a brooding, mysterious carnival worker. This was definitely a Hollywood fantasy world because this guy looked nothing like the greasy toothless track-marked workers that staff, I don't know, EVERY SINGLE CARNIVAL I've ever experienced in my lifetime.
But with the Schaefer flowing, and all of us between boyfriends, this movie quickly moved into heavy rotation. Eventually, the novelty wore off and we realized that Richard Tyson is actually pretty gross, a fact later confirmed by his performance as Cullen Crisp in Kindergarten Cop.
And so in the spirit of love, and with visions of carnys dancing in my head, I'll leave you with another heartwarming piece of family exploitation - one in which my daughter, after having her Electra complex go from zero to 60 in under ten seconds while watching the movie Enchanted, created a little book in which she writes about the mating habits of adult humans.
Again, purely from a theoretical point of view. Certainly not by observing the mating rituals of her parents.
I posted it over here,and I hope y'all enjoy it as much as her art teacher did.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Carnal Thoughts
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
How About A Nice Divorce For Mother's Day?
For whatever reason, I started getting emails from Splash Car Wash when I got arm-twisted into signing up for a "frequent washer" card.
I don't know why I bothered. I hate that minivan so much, it's lucky that I let it stay in the garage and feed it as much of the hideously expensive engine juice as I do.
I get the thing washed approximately once a year, usually the day after this happens: I'm pulling into the parking lot at work, late (as usual) for a 9:30 meeting thanks to an ill-timed kid tantrum at morning dropoff.
Nattily attired in some summer white pants, I get out of the car and proceed to drop my lunch box, which breaks and scatters my food rather spectacularly across the parking lot. As I'm bending over to pick up all my crap I brush up against the filthy car door, which leaves a gigantic, black, oily, Texas-shaped Rorschach Test on my ass all day for the entire office to contemplate.
But I digress, as usual.
The above image on the left is the email that Splash sent out. And while I applaud their use of a timely theme and their marketing chutzpah, I could not help but say out loud, "I don't effing think so."
Manager Dad has been duly forewarned that if he also happens to be the mailing list, and this is the best idea he can wring from his overtired and overtaxed grey matter for a Mother's Day present, I will swiftly implement a unilateral year-long laundry embargo in retaliation.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Tom Brady Is In My Basement
It's the Tom Brady from Connecticut Basement Systems, here to provide an estimate on how much it would cost to install a new sump pump.
Nonetheless, it was highly entertaining to send Manager Dad an email with this post title as the subject line. In his reply, he indicated that he would make a few stops on the way home from work: 1) to purchase a pregnancy test and 2) to have a quick consultation with a divorce attorney.
If you did click here, sorry, no more pearls of entertainment in this post. I just couldn't figure out how to get rid of the "click here" link.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Another One Bites The Dust
I recently learned that yet another of my friends got divorced after nearly 14 years of marriage. This makes the success rate of my best friends' marriages about 50% - I guess this makes our group average. Some of them got divorced within a few years of marrying their college sweethearts; others lasted for a few years and are now toppling during the mythic 7-year itch window. I had one of my friends who just got re-married refer to her "starter marriage" with the same kind of fuzzy nostalgia some reserve for a beloved childhood pet.
Divorce is no big deal nowadays, right? Some fun facts:
- 41% of all first marriages bite dust after a median length of 8 years. 60% of second marriages end after about 7 years. Don't even bother with a third unless you have a good lawyer - 75% of those are destined to fail. (To quote Kanye in 'Golddigger' - "We want pre-nup! We want pre-nup!")
- Connecticut has the second lowest divorce rate of all U.S. states - 2.8% end in divorce in any given year. Must be our puritan heritage. Or the fact that people in Fairfield County don't want to dilute their assets through divorce - extramarital affairs are much cheaper. Unless you get caught.
- Sweden has the highest average divorce rate (over 50%); India, the lowest (1%). Is that because Sweden seems to have a high concentration of young, blonde, gorgeous, nubile, home-wrecking au pairs?
- The marriage of Scott Mckie and Victoria Anderson may not officially be the shortest on record (90 minutes), but the circumstances of their demise (click here to read about them) is certainly one of the most entertaining.
I'm not trying to be high and mighty or melodramatic, but as an only child from a 'broken home' herself - divorce sucks. I think people are trying to make some lemonade out of the lemons - throwing Divorce Parties, buying whimsical favors for post-divorce cleansing rituals (check out Penis Pinatas from the Divorce Party Supply Website) But that doesn't change the fact that it's a sad, lonely, emotionally damaging, and expensive time of people's lives. I am determined to NEVER put my own kids through that unless it is the absolute point of last resort. You will pry my husband from my cold, dead hands. (Or, you will pry his cold, dead hands from me. Yes Will, this means you.)
To my friends who got, are getting, or will eventually get divorced, I'm sorry you have to go through that. Especially those of you with kids - I salute you and am in awe of how you keep it all together as single moms or dads. I hope for each of you that someday you do find love again and buck the odds to make it last.
Or, at the very least, that you find your bliss in a lifestyle similar to my friend Karl the Perpetual Bachelor - lounging by the pool at the Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas on Rehab Sunday, buying drinks for random, large-breasted local skanks. Rock on, Karl!
