Archive for the 'Life with the Possessed' Category
The Twelve Steps of Chocoholics Anonymous
Hi, my name’s The Mad Sister, aka The Bear, and I’m a chocoholic. The need for chocolate has overtaken my life and affected those I love. Before I found Chocoholics Anonymous, my life had become a blur of chocolate. Late nights with Ben and Jerry, bars of melted chocolate ruining the pockets of my best blue jeans, the adrenaline rushes of stealing chocolate from my mother’s purse to get my fix…there was no end to what I would do to get my chocolate fix every day. I’ve come to rely on the Twelve Steps of Chocoholics Anonymous to restore me to sanity and to Vanilla. I no longer want to live in this chocolate prison!
I share these twelve steps with you today so that you might come back to sanity, come back to the Vanilla. Now that I am 30 SECONDS sober from chocolate, it is time for me to help others. With Valentine’s Day, that most unholy of chocolate consumption days, just around the corner, the matter of chocolate addiction is urgent!
The Twelve Steps of Chocoholics Anonymous
Step 1: We admitted that we were powerless over chocolate in all its forms, but most especially when embedded in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and that our lives had become unmanageable due to obsessive thoughts about chocolate and the coercion necessary to obtain it.
Step 2: We came to believe that a power higher than ourselves could restore us to Vanilla.
Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Vanilla as we understood Vanilla.(boooooring….er, ah, ahem.)
Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and then a fearless chocolate inventory of all our cupboards, pockets, and drawers.
Step 5: We admitted to our higher Vanilla, to ourselves and to another human being the exact daily weight of our chocolate consumption.
Step 6: We became entirely ready to have a Higher Vanilla remove all our defective chocolate seeking taste buds.
Step 7: We humbly asked our Higher Vanilla to remove our shortcomings and all the chocolate at the grocery counter.
Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed in our pursuit of chocolate (and there were many), and became willing to make amends over ahot fudge sundaevanilla shake.
Step 9: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except if they were eating a chocolate bar at the time.
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and promptly donated all hidden chocolate stashesto my Momto the needy.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Vanilla as we understood it.
Step 12: Having had a Vanilla awakening as the result of these steps, we work to try to carry this message to chocoholics everywhere, and to practice Vanilla in all our affairs.
** A message from Velvet Verbosity, mother to The Mad Sister: “Please pray for The Mad Sister as she battles this insidious addiction. Her constant need for chocolate has brought our family to the brink of financial ruin and torn us asunder. May the Vanilla be with her.”
Image from www.buychocolatecandy.com
9 commentsMore on Life With the Possessed
This is what happens when you tell your savvy 15 year old daughter that, NO, she cannot get her belly button pierced because it sends the wrong message and all that. And if you don’t know, this is Pink.
Time Flies…
A little video entertainment while I’m busy behind the tarp. (The video takes several seconds to start.)
. At the end, it reads, “Time flies, and we fly with it”
Because She’s A Teenager, That’s Why
There’s a little morning ritual that my daughter likes to go through. It’s called “Not Getting Up if My Life Depended On it”. This morning, I wake her up several times, each time my assertions getting firmer and louder. Finally, she throws off the covers, pops out of the bed and brushes past me heading for the bathroom. I smile a little victory smile and go back to my room to get dressed for the day.
Several minutes into my morning prep, I realize something doesn’t feel right. Things are too…still. Too quiet.
I knock on the bathroom door. No answer. I knock again, still with no answer. There is not a sound coming from behind that bathroom door. Could it be…? I open the door and right there, on the floor, is the Mad Sister curled up on the bathroom rug! And because she’s a teenager, she is actually PUT OUT when I wake her up.
4 commentsI Spent the Night with Ira Glass
Never mind. The more important question is, what did I like to do before my Macbook Pro and the internet sucked me into their firm grasps? Meditate, run, exercise, bike, read, write, see live music, photography, videography, make art, cook, have dinner with friends, listen to music, find new music, visit old bookstores, sit in cafes and write about the people I saw, volunteer, get involved, bury treasure, climb mountains, drink chai, write letters, learn guitar, LIVE.
Not that blogging isn’t some form of a lot of the above, but really, I was beginning to feel like I was sinking deeper and deeper into the pixels on my screen and I wasn’t liking the way it felt. I was never one of those people that got deeply sucked into television except for my yearly January binges of Law and Order while I was an undergrad (at 32) at Smith. I would get bored long before I felt entertained. I always liked to be doing rather than watching.
When I was about 10, the first versions of cable were hitting my neighborhood. I honestly don’t even remember if it was satellite dishes or cable that came first. I just didn’t care. So when my neighbors, the short hair twins, got more channels through whatever mechanism it was, they stopped coming out to play after school. Then they stayed in later and later on Saturday mornings. I would go over, knock on the door, and one or the other of them would run to the door, distractedly looking back over their shoulder as they quickly and breathlessly told me they “couldn’t come out right now because Tom and Jerry was playing on the television”.
“Well, when?” I would ask.
“After this are two more cartoons. We got all the channels!”
Then she, whichever “she” she was, would run back into the living room, leaving me with treasure to bury by myself. I just didn’t get it. Many a friend got taken by the television monster that year. Other than not having my usual minions to construct my elaborate fantasy world, I was perfectly fine with it. I was a pretty solitary kid and didn’t like most other kids anyway. Mostly because no matter how clean, kids always smelled funny to me. And they were every bit as mean as they were stupid. Kids were always being mean to one another and my gawd it was always a drama.
I did watch some television, of course. At night, when I couldn’t be outside anymore, and when there were cool shows on like Grizzly Adams. Man I wanted to be that guy. Not marry him. I wanted to be him. He was the shit! I wanted that life of false accusations forcing me into the mountainous wilderness where my best friend would become a Grizzly Bear and together we would live out our lives in industrious dignity.
Most importantly, I’d have to figure out all those animals and all those plants and back when I was 10 that was as good as life could get.
Since I had this unexpected gift of openness, I figured it was as good a time as any to bring up the birds and the bees. I learned that it is true that she knows girls who “service” boys that they have no connection to, and they get nothing in return. I learned (thank God) that she can’t understand this behavior or why a girl would do this to herself, particularly when there is nothing in it for the girl except a bad reputation. I learned that she feels it is partly fueled by boys’ expectations and the girls’ desire to be liked for any reason.
I learned that we can still talk when we remove the electronic distractions that make it much easier to walk away then to talk. I learned that she still likes to have her hands massaged.
When my children were young, I purposefully kept television out of their lives for a long time. As they got older, all those things crept in, one by one, until we were all holed up in our sections of the house, chattering with everyone but each other. Our conversations were reserved for the rare dinner together when our schedules didn’t conflict, or car rides.
I’m going to turn off the internet and cable more often!
No Internet and Two Angry Teens
This morning I announced, rather firmly, that I would be canceling internet service and cable television. Evil Knievel and The Mad Sister murmured “whatever” into their pillows and then promptly fell back to sleep because they stay up too late watching television, playing XBox Live, updating their Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and SO on. Not to mention I myself have been staying up way too late blogging, reading blogs, commenting, etc.
What? Did you hear something?
So I will be composing blog posts in Word and then only checking during lunchtime and at the end of the work day for comments. If I’m scarce on your blog, forgive me. I need to reign this in for my family or we’re all going to end up looking like the Simpsons.
Two weeks. That’s the goal.
1 commentConfessions of a Teenage Mother OR Velvet Verbosity Suffers from Ephebiphobia
Ephebiphobia - the fear of teenagers.
The Surgeon General warns that teenagers can be hazardous to your sanity. Only you’ve never seen this warning because it’s branded onto their backsides and even though the boys wear their pants around their knees and girls’ low-rise jeans reveal more than a thong bikini, you, their parent, will never have the right to look there again. And that would be fine and good if it wasn’t that you also aren’t allowed to look directly at their face for more than .5 seconds, you’re not allowed to expect that your favorite shirts won’t disappear, to have any of the snackfood in the house, or to breathe in the wrong way because you’re annoying them. If you’re wondering why you didn’t ever notice the Surgeon General’s warning when they were still in diapers, that’s because it’s kind of like that etching on the One Ring. The warning only shows up under conditions of extreme hormonal fluctuation. And that, my friends, is the real truth about why they wear through their jeans so fast.
37 Minute Countdown to Post OR How Not to Turn Nurses Into Serial Killers Like Kristen Gilbert
I just realized that even though I posted twice yesterday that it doesn’t excuse me from not posting today, and now I only have 37 MINUTES before the clock strikes midnight! I’m a little behind the ball since I spent SIX HOURS in the ER this afternoon-evening. My son, henceforth referred to as Evil Knievel, got into an accident on a friend’s dirt-bike.
“This is why I didn’t have boys!”, my mother would say.
I think it’s a little late for that.
I learned some things about emergency rooms. What else was I going to do for six hours? My laptop died after two and Evil Knievel fell asleep after three. But first, a question. Why do they call it the Emergency Room? It is not a rooooom. It is a maze of hallways, and desks, and yes, rooms. ROOMssssssss. Plural.
Now for what I’ve observed.
Our small town ER was pretty busy this afternoon. Since Evil Knievel only had three broken bones he was not a priority for a room, so we were given a nice hallway bed. Actually, he got the bed, I got the wall to lean on, until I accosted a housekeeper and asked where the nearest chair was so I could get it myself.
As I stood/sat there in the hallway I saw several nurses walk by. The same nurses, over and over. Nurses who had taken Evil Knievel’s vital signs, asked questions, examined all his sore places, and set up his paperwork. They knew us, and as the hours ticked on, they knew just how long we had been there. They were all well-seasoned, experienced nurses. Then, there was the new guy. The new guy made eye contact when he walked by. The experienced nurses did not make eye contact. They knew, when you work in the ER where no one really knows how long you’ll be waiting? DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT! It will only slow you down to have to answer questions that you do not have answers to. Poor new guy. He’ll learn.
I also learned that the old adage that the squeaky wheel gets the oil is true. I saw it in action. It was the most annoying patients that got out of there in under three hours. Yeah. Like the guy in the room next to our hallway? He had been waiting an hour and a half (we were well on three at that point) when I overheard this.
Nurse: I know you’ve been waiting a while but you’re next in line.
Cranky McCranky Pants: No I’m not. Don’t lie to me.
Nurse: No, you are. I don’t know how long it will be but you are next.
“I’m miserable and so shall you be”: Whatever.
Nurse: Can I get you a blanket?
What a Jerk: No. Don’t worry about me. I’m just in pain. I’m not important.
He was outta there within the next 30 minutes. Him and the little old lady who kept moaning like a scorned sea demoness, and the 20-something who wanted narcotics and cursed at the doctor when he wouldn’t deliver.
The final thing I learned is that when you sit in the hallway for six hours, not uttering a single complaint, but inquiring kindly now and then as to when you might expect a doctor, you get the best treatment they can give you. You get a free cup of coffee with four sugars and lots of cream. You get people wishing you well when you leave. You get a little bit of extra attention when they can give it because they’re just so grateful that you’re not screaming obscenities or having the gall to almost die on them. And you don’t turn them into serial nurse killers like Kristen Gilbert. And that’s a good thing.
6 commentsSleeping In His Talk
Sleep talking is uniquely entertaining. It’s like hearing one side of a conversation. A dream-scape conversation that ends up sounding slightly psychotic, or drug-induced.
My son talks in his sleep and this morning when I went to his room to wake him up, before I could say a word, he smacked his lips, flopped an arm around and said,
“Oh No.” (pause) “Not another jerk-face”.
What? There was more than one?
No commentsWhere Did She Come From?
I gave birth, almost fourteen years ago, to an unbelievable life force. Loud, forceful, funny, outgoing, athletic, brave-as-all-hell, thoughtful, organized, and stunningly beautiful. Everything I’m not. How does that happen?
Today, she and I were driving around looking for a parking spot, and in one of the few parking lots, there was a car just sitting, idling. The first time we drove by, we looked in and took note that the occupants of the car were a young, good-looking couple. As I drove past the car several minutes later, for the second time, I wondered aloud what they were doing just sitting there. It was annoying me for no particular reason. I thought maybe they knew something I didn’t, like that in two minutes half the stuffed parking lot would clear out, and they were just patiently waiting for some prime downtown parkage.
After I grumbled to myself, “what the heck are they doing?”, my daughter promptly replied, “They’re being hot…just give them a minute”.
Out of the mouths of babes…
8 comments
