Cotton swab, anyone?

Years ago, when my son was maybe 10? 12? I asked him to run into my bathroom, get into the middle drawer, and bring me back my nail clippers.  Ever the cheerful young man, he said, “Sure!” and darted off.

One minute later he appears, holding a Q-Tip, having completely spaced my original request in 60 seconds.

So you can imagine my thoughts this morning as I dropped him off for his first day of work at his first job. He’s going to be a dishwasher at a local restaurant (Los Dos Molinos, which is about the best ever). I will endorse his skills by saying that, after years of seeing Sam handle our own dinner dishes, I will eat from their china and use their utensils with complete confidence, knowing that he is behind the faucet.

When I dropped him off, my first thought was to simply drive home as he walked up to the front door. But something (maybe it was a cotton swab) made me stop and make sure he got in the door. Which he didn’t. Seems the restaurant wasn’t open yet, so the front door was locked.

I watched him knock on the door. I watched him pull out his cell phone and call. Then I watched him leave a message. He saw me waiting and approached the car, and he thought checking out a back door would work (that’s executive-level thinking, Evans!) and I offered to drive him around to the rear of the strip mall.

I’m sure that the owner of the restaurant (a lovely woman, whom I have talked to in passing for some thirty years as some combination of our family members have eaten in her establishments around town) assumed I was a typical helicopter mother as she ushered Sam into the kitchen for a morning of Dishwashing Delights. But I’m not, really.

I just remember the Q-Tip.

© E. Stocking Evans

 

 

 

 

My New Year’s Resolution….

 

….is I’m not going to blog at all.

Psych!

Just read this month’s column, specially featured in the New Year’s Day edition of the Ahwatukee Foothills News, and you’ll get it.

© E. Stocking Evans

 

 

Devoid of content.

T.S. Eliot would be proud. My mind is a complete blank.

Mind you (pun intended), it’s not for lack of junk to think about. I got lots of that.

It’s that there’s so much to think about, that it all has become a blizzard that has approached whiteout conditions in my tiny brain pan, and I cannot so much as scrape the metaphorical ice off my allegorical windshield with my symbolic credit card so I can try to start the hypothetical car of my mind, only to find that the engine block has frozen and cracked.

There’s nothing to stop me from making a few analogous snowballs, however, while I wait for the Triple A truck:

- Steve Jobs passed away, sadly, and such is his presence that, despite stories of his legendary, shall we say, mercurial treatment of his employees and family, the Twitterverse exploded in grief. Margie Phelps, the daughter of the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, exploded herself with the thought of all that PR opportunity and announced that she and her cohorts would picket his funeral as Jobs was, apparently, the anti-Christ or at  the very least, his second cousin and was rightly in Hell.

Hilariously, she used her iPhone to tweet the news. Even more hilarious: when that little irony was tweeted back to her, she told the world where to get off and quit hating on her because, and I quote: “God created iPhone for that purpose!”

Which means that God is in Hell, according to the High Priestess of Hate. Epilogue: God had enough money and so was able to arrange for the one thing those families of our fallen military could not:  privacy and thus, sanctuary from Phelps and her minions.

- One of the reasons the anti-freeze has leaked out of the radiator of my id is that the world keeps looking for, and conducting the same stupid arguments. In my quest to thaw out my brain freeze, I was reading Huffington Post and stumbled across a contribution from Jamie Lee Curtis extolling the virtues of growing heirloom tomatoes and creating artisan bread and playing word games whilst drinking hand-crafted gourmet coffee and why the heck aren’t we ALL doing that instead of banging our heads against a corporate wall and what does that say about feminism?

The comments de-evolved into the usual debate about what women should *really* be doing and what feminism is really about and included, of course, the standard snarky comments about women who abandon their children because they don’t really have to work.

This was a rare occasion where two of my pet peeves get together and mate to make a gigantic Snowmageddon:

First pet peeve: wealthy, clueless actresses/celebrities spouting off about the realities of being a working mom and presuming to understand the priorities of people who are not independently wealthy. Normally I dig JLC and I really liked that magazine piece where she posed in her underwear without any re-touching, and I like it that she doesn’t act like she can hide from Time (the way we measure entropy, not the magazine). I just don’t know when the bleep her reason abandoned her. Any idiot knows it’s more fun to play Words with Friends and grow tomatoes or [insert any leisure activity here] than haul one’s ass out of bed at 5 a.m. to go to work. Apparently just any idiot hasn’t figured out that for so many of  us, there would be no tomatoes or word games (or roof over our heads, or food for our children) if we didn’t haul our asses out of bed to go to work.

AND

Second pet peeve: any debate about what women should be doing with their lives. By people other than the woman herself and her immediate family. Because here’s a clue: YOU (and by ‘YOU’ I mean the general ‘you,’ not *you*) ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO EVALUATE WHAT ANY OTHER PERSON CHOOSES TO DO WITH THEIR LIVES, provided that the laws of the land are being observed. If the laws of the land are not being observed, then you have the same chance as anyone else to sit on the jury.

This…this, dear readers, is where my fingers get the typing version of brain freeze. I’m so tired of reading all this stuff. I’m even more tired of writing it.

And that’s the nice thing about dying in the cold…it’s really kind of peaceful and quiet.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

I wasn’t kidding about the coffee.

It’s the first week of the month, and we know what means: new column’s up! You can click here or click here:

Intrigante….

Lafayette's marriage contract

News links sometimes disappear, so I’ll paraphrase: In Mexico City, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce within two years. So liberal lawmakers are proposing that budding brides and grooms be able to get a two-year contract on their marriage, with an option to renew, so as to avoid the cost and challenges of a divorce.

I may have blogged about it before, but my tagging is execrable so I can’t be sure, so bear with me: these guys may have an idea.

I think divorce has skyrocketed because (and while I hate generalizations I’m gonna do it anyway) many men still believe they’re operating under an old model, or have been raised by men who did, and modeled the behavior. Old model: back when a woman HAD to have a man to survive, all you needed to do to be a decent husband was to bring home your paycheck (or at least most of it), not drink too much, and not hit anyone so hard as to leave a mark. If a woman needed you to survive, all you had to do was be survivable.

Sadly (but only for the Old Model and the divorce rate), women have caught on to the fact that we don’t need to put up with ‘survivable.’ And that being alone might be better than being with someone who is just ‘survivable.’ And that the definition of ‘decent’ could be upgraded.

So I’m going out on the ledge to say: it’s a good thing the divorce rate has skyrocketed. It would be a bad thing if that Old Model persisted, and the divorce rate is a sign that it won’t. There are many who would tell you that the women’s libbers killed marriage as we know it, and I am fine with that. If the institution of marriage is to survive at all, and we’re going to really strive for romantic love to be the basis, the foundation of marriage needs to change so that it is a partnership, not a job.

Would the two-year Mexican contract accomplish that? I don’t know. Would I be on my best behavior if I knew I was getting a performance appraisal every two years and wanted to keep the gig? Most certainly. (Note: it might behoove all of us to treat our marriages as constantly being under review; how many people have been blindsided by a divorce, swooping in out of the blue like an eagle after a mouse?)

If I were in a relationship trough (and we all find ourselves in them) and knew that I had to stick it out at least until the end of the contract would it keep me from walking out the door and then maybe we’d be out of the trough when it came time to renew? Perhaps. Does the lifelong commitment thing make people depressed when they’re in a trough and make them more likely to want to pull the relationship plug? Would knowing that they had an out in two years make it easier (kind of like ‘one day at a time’ for an alcoholic)?

I know this: if you want to preserve the concept of marriage, managing the expectations of people about to get married would be a better place to start, rather than making it easier for married people to bail. But a lawmaker can’t do much with that, because that would involve manipulating social mores and pressure and conventions on a grand scale, so a two-year contract is born, with its little tail vigorously wagging the dog.

Full disclosure: my parents have been married for 61 years. They tell everyone that they kept the peace for the first years by agreeing that whoever left had to take all five kids; since then, they’ve lived in a death penalty state. Don’t believe it: they still make out in the kitchen. And we all know couples like that. So I’ll stipulate that truly happy marriages were forged back in the day, and can be today.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

Two posts in a post about another post about chocolate milk and birthdays.

Eh, just buy stock in Nestle’s, as we do this twice a year.

There’s an epilogue/prologue to all this: Dad and I were reflecting on Patrick’s birthday last night and we can’t even imagine Patrick at 56. It defies all reason to think of him as a middle-aged cartographer, eating oatmeal and making maps and reading sci-fi and losing track of the world for weeks on end. It’s insane, because this is how I always think of him, still.

Me? I make it a drinking game; every time I think of how much I miss him, I do a shot. Of Nestle’s, of course.

This is what I wrote last year about RackRack (my sister’s name for him) and his birthday.

 

 

 

 

No girlfriends were harmed in the writing of this column.

You know the drill. Click for a link or click to read more.

(The print edition was fun, though: they added stock photos, which is a first for the Mom, Interrupted.)

****************************************************************

I know. I disappear for weeks and then BAM! Twice in six hours.

There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere, but I’m not stooping to pick it up.

I’ll let you do that.

Seriously: my sainted mother asked me to make sure I posted August’s column. So here it is. For Mom,  about Dad, fresh from the Ahwatukee Foothills News.

All about my firstborn, first seen in August, 2007

This column first ran the  month my oldest daughter turned 18. Everything you read here is still true, and has only gotten better.   Some days I dream of winning the lottery,  and then I remember: oh yeah, I’ve already done that.

I don’t get a vacation, as a general rule.

 

Except when I take off from posting. I got kinda sick of myself for awhile, and even though I can’t get much vacation from myself doesn’t mean YOU can’t.

I don’t take off from the Ahwatukee Foothills News, though.   Since 2002, I have never missed a deadline. And this month was no exception. You could click this to read it right off the site, or you can read it after the jump. Of course, all I can do is jump virtually now….