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Tasty Bugs Of The Sea
July 30, 2007 by NaysWay · Leave a Comment
Last week, I got into a debate with one of our company’s IT guys about seafood. I happen to be a huge fan of the delicacy. There are very few things in the seafood family I won’t eat – caviar being a pretty big no-no because I just can’t wrap my mind around eating salty fish babies and calling it mm-mm good – so this makes me a connoisseur of sorts on the subject. I try to use logic as my reasoning into why a Red Lobster® commercial makes me sit up and take notice, mid-conversation, rendering me speechless with its screen shots of glossy tilapia, succulent scrimps (no one really eats shrimps anymore, thought you should know) and mouth-watering lobster tails. Logic like I am a water sign, therefore I am doing my astrological brethren a disservice by rejecting their fresh and salt water offerings to me, their human counterpart. I didn’t say this was sane rationale.
IT guy is not so hot about seafood. He says he refuses to eat anything that carries its house around – waste included – with it. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this said. My first encounter was with a movie called Drop Dead Gorgeous, and the movie’s star, Kirsten Dunst, said her mother told her the same. This kept her from getting food poisoning from a catering company that served her fellow contestants and judges. It was a scene that gave me pause. The pause didn’t last long because, let’s face it, it’s seafood. Call me “Bubba”. De vein it, boil it, fry it, sautée it, slap some butter on that there, Hoss, and pass the lemon wedge.
My stepdad makes the joke that crab legs are the equivalent of mass murder. That the crabs are crying with every snap, crack and pop of their shells. Oh, the humanity, he cries. I make it no better. If he adds sound effects with screams and moans, even going so far as to name each leg I snap open, I respond with a “Mm-mm! Dave. You sure are TASTY!” No one complains when they’re cutting into Bessie the cow with a side of sautéed onions and mushrooms.
IT guy also makes the point that seafood are the bugs of the sea – especially lobsters. EW! I mean, yum, but EW! C’est la vie. Can I get a baked potato with that antennae?
Cinematic Literature
July 27, 2007 by NaysWay · Leave a Comment
“You don’t read enough books.”
“I know.”
“How can you become a great author if you don’t read enough books?”
“I read books for the words. I watch movies and television for the stories.”
“…”
“Books take too long to get to the point… and I can’t see them. Well, I CAN see them, but my picture doesn’t come into focus until the second act. Sometimes longer.”
“…”
“Or my picture starts off one way, then changes midway through the book. It’s very frustrating.”
“You’re weird.”
“You’re just now figuring this out?”
Selectivity & The Directionally Challenged
July 25, 2007 by NaysWay · Leave a Comment
I am not good with directions. Never have been. My inability to not only fully listen to a coherent sentence, but completely misconstrue it to make my own interpretation, is something that makes me infamous…to those that know and love me.
When I was a little girl, my mother would tell me to get something for her out of the kitchen. I would tear off in a flash to get the requested item, only to come back empty handed as I’d never heard exactly what it was she asked for. It made no difference if I was physically shown the item either. Verbally or visually, there was a disconnect in my brain. It is a disease commonly known as “Directionus Challengus”, also known as “directionally challenged”. Couple this terrible affliction with “Selectivus Cochleato”, AKA “selective hearing”, and there I was. No need to look these up. Believe me. They exist.
Some twenty-plus years later, Mooter has acquired the same disease. I was not informed that the disease was passed along generations. I blame my mother, wicked woman that she is, for not telling me this nugget of information sooner. During my childless years, she spent many a day flustered with me and my lack of attention to the simplest request. “Go to the kitchen, open the drawer on the left of the cabinet, get me the pen in the silverware holder” became “Someone in the kitchen has a mower and a cleft chin. I would like my beer to be colder.” Off I went to get a cold beer for my mother from the fridge – I never saw the person with the cleft chin or that stupid lawnmower… maybe they were outside – and when I returned, she looked as if she’d given birth to a space alien and wanted to figure the best way to return it to its mother ship.
She laughs at these stories now, especially the ones I tell her where Mooter is told to retrieve a blanket from the chair that’s right in front of her face, to which she responds “Where?”. Point all you will. She ain’t lookin’ at that blanket. It’s become invisible. Know why this is funny to my mother? “I used to do the same thing when I was a kid. I just didn’t want to tell you.”
See what I mean? WICKED!
The Big Protest
July 21, 2007 by NaysWay · Leave a Comment
Mooter does not want to go to Kindergarten.
Today was our site visit at the most awesomest Catholic, privately sectored K-8 this parent has seen e-ver. It didn’t take long for me to be sold, what with the state of the art technology, science labs, music AND DRAMA (oh my God, my heart just skipped a beat) facilities I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing. We had Nana in tow, both she and I wishing we were five again if only to attend this school. Mooter, on the other hand, clung tightly with the grip of life to my thigh. I didn’t know eyes could get that big. I think hers emitted beams similar to those of alien spaceships. We could mount her on a cliff in Cape Cod for all the boats lost at sea. That’s how wide her eyes were.
The principal and teacher greeted us warmly, walked us through the facility, answered any questions. They asked Mooter to spell her (real) name, trying to warm her up a bit. The girl was cold as ice. If she could have melted into my leg I think she would have. I was the same at her age. Actually, I was worse. I cried. A lot. She will probably cry her first day.
By the end of the tour, she finally came around the instant we said our goodbyes and she could make out my mother’s car in the parking lot. A look of “Thank God THAT’S over” swept across her face, only to revert when I told her how happy Momma was that we’d finally found a Kindergarten for her. “You mean I HAVE TO COME BACK?!”
Yes, love.
Conversations With Mooter (Pt. 2)
July 20, 2007 by NaysWay · Leave a Comment
It’s July. This means BFam and I have exactly one month to get Mooter enrolled in kindergarten. “Bad parents,” you say, “to procrastinate like this, waiting until the very last moment to enroll your child in what is sure to become her first memorable experience in a real school.” Come, now. Give us more credit than that. We, unfortunately, live in a city with strict district laws. You are not allowed to place your child in a public school of another city without being a resident there. Seems fair enough. Wouldn’t want the entire north quadrant of the city overpopulating the place. Might be a fire hazard. This means Mooter has to go to private schools because the public schools in our district have metal detectors at every entrance, and curse their teachers, and have shoot-outs in the school’s parking lots, and have students who decide they want to conduct their own Biology course and have group sex while the underpaid teacher goes out to her car (during class) for a cigarette.
Hence Mooter’s induction into private school. BFam and I don’t make private school money, but we also can’t afford the aneurysm that is sure to come with just the thought of our five-year-old child coming home singing the lyrics to “Ay Bay Bay“. Just when we were getting to the point in our lives where we thought a nice break in our bank accounts was on the way, we realized we couldn’t move out of our neighborhood fast enough to make this happen.
Tomorrow morning, Mooter, Nana (her grandmother, my mother) have an appointment for a site visit at a Catholic school. While we are not Catholic, most private schools in our surrounding suburbs are… or Lutheran. As I gave Mooter her bath, I briefed her on our itinerary for the morning. I felt like the secretary to Barbie…
“OK, Moot. In the morning, when you wake up, we’re going to see a new school for you.”
“Will I wear something pretty?”
“Yes… well, I guess. Um…”
“Daddy will pick me out something pretty. Do I wear new shoes and a new dress?”
“No honey. You’re not going to church. We’re just going to look at a school.”
“But, I like my school now!”
“I know you do, but you’ve graduated. It’s time for you to go to a big school now.”
[sighs] “Oh, I know. Because I’m seventeen now.” To explain, an aunt of Mooter’s recently graduated from high school. She is seventeen. Mooter now believes everyone who graduates does so because they’re seventeen.
“No, you’re going to be six soon. But, six is a big girl age. It’s not seventeen, but you can’t go to a little person school anymore.”
She sits quietly in the tub for a moment, pondering our conversation, absorbing its content. Then, “But I will have nothing to wear to the new school and no one will say ‘oh, that’s so pretty, you clothes and you shoes and you hair’, and I NEVER get to wear it, Momma!”
I plan to purchase a tiara and ball gown for her first official day of school.
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