All posts by Licketysplit

Hi, I see from my notes that you’re crazy!

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Yesterday I got a call from someone at my health insurance company (“the home of the whopper deductible”). She pussyfooted around describing how their team of nurses helps manage chronic conditions without saying which one, but would I be interested in participating? Hmm, are they talking about my combination skin? My distaste for people who write checks at the supermarket? I’ll bite.

“Why are you calling me?”

“Uh…we see you’ve sought counseling in the past.”

“Well, I’m not actively depressed now, believe it or not. I’m slowly killing time until a baby is old enough to do my taxes, but unless you’ve got a time machine, I think I’m all set.”

Silence…scribbling…”We see you entered counseling again this summer.”

“Yes, having a child tends to throw one for a loop and require at least 3 therapy hours. Did you know babies are kind of passive-aggressive?”

“I see….”

“But I assure you, I know the drill about the depression business. It’s about as exciting as coming down with a cold for me. When I feel bad, I get help. I don’t enjoy being depressed.”

“Oh! That’s great! Some people do.”

Silence on my end….

“Well, the initial interview for this program takes twenty minutes.” A baby began to shriek violently. No, I did not pinch her. She probably needs mental health help more than I do. I think she must be bi-polar. I caught her emptying my savings account and buying tickets to Moscow last week.

I hustled the lady off the phone by putting the mouthpiece right by a baby. Yell your way to privacy! Maybe I will write them a nice letter suggesting that if they really want to help improve my life, they will opt to cover more of the crap that costs me money. No, clearly that is batshit nuts! Calling and poking around for personal information about non-critical situations is obviously far more effective.

Content…challenging

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I am a failure as a human being. I did not write a post yesterday. I started one, and it got erased. Nor did I vote in the Democratic primary today. The terrorists are winning! I should be more politically active than ever, what with having to hand this shitbucket of an earth over to an innocent child, but said innocent child is going through a phase not unlike the tortured adolescence of a Tasmanian Devil. This makes basic tasks im-fucking-possible. We reap what we sow. I guess. I also did not recycle. And I fired the babysitter. One day… a new record in didn’t work out. Reproduction…a supremely stupid idea. Er, I mean “it’s all worth it.” And it is worth it, for the five minutes of gummy smiling a day. But, you argue, you could hire an elderly homeless person if gummy smiling is your thing. I’m sorry, I am not breastfeeding the homeless. No matter how often that one guy on the third bench to the left of my house may ask. Speaking of breastfeeding, I was reading the “mystery diagnosis” column in the NYT magazine the other day, and a banner ad nagged “Babies were born to breastfeed.” I was already breastfeeding a baby right at that moment, and I got this mega defensive feeling, like “what the fuck more do you want from me, banner ad?” That banner ad wants to smoke a cigarette when it’s already smoking.

In closing, tits tits tits tits tits tits.

A baby shan’t attend college now

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A baby celebrated three months of excreting yesterday! Guess how she celebrated that. Just go on and guess. Keeping her alive all that time was approximately ten trillion times harder than keeping Sea Monkeys alive, and that’s hard anyway.

She’ll never learn to read because we can’t afford reading now. Mr. H toted up what his comic book collection would be worth, and we had a little moment of ka-ching! But then he called his parents and found out they gave it away at a yard sale recently. Oh, snap. Oh.

The locals on the Yahoo! Group continue to infuriate me. They are now calling pre-meetings for meetings. If I wanted to go to meetings about meetings, I’d have a goddamn job. There is an issue with flood insurance that may end in litigation with the management company, and one bokka booka crazy woman suggested that someone go to the registry of deeds and compile a list of people who actually owned when the flood took place, so as to exclude people who did not own at the time from the meeting. Yes, because PEOPLE LOVE TO GO TO EXTRA FUCKING MEETINGS THAT DON’T CONCERN THEM. People volunteer to attend meetings left and right, and it takes some super sleuthing to stop them. Everything is a conspiracy.

ZOMG

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Yesterday was Mr. H’s birthday. He is now Old. How sad for him! To celebrate, we tried sneaking away for dinner after a baby was asleep. Of course a baby opted to wake up and vomit all over his sister. Still, that was the best glass of wine and speed-eaten entree I’ve had in months. We returned to find a baby fully alert and talking to a stuffed bear.

Yahoo! Groups: tool of the devil? I read through 50-odd messages from the bitches who are vying to be condo board president for our complex. People are complaining that as the temperature drops, the windows are drafty. Someone was spotted pulling a door open by holding the key in the lock. Someone’s parking spot has a pot hole that collects rainwater. People want parking stickers for our DEEDED, NUMBERED parking spots. Now, we don’t even have an association yet. The complex is under control of the management company until December, when we can technically form an association. This sticker decision was made by some sort of pre-association cabal, drunk with the power of reply-all. Unless I get to go to a meeting and vote/complain about it (I will make a baby raise her hand too), it seems slightly premature to be pricing out the printing of stickers. When someone is in my spot, I don’t really care if that person has a sticker or not. I know that person is not me, and hence I am justified in calling the towing company. So simple and elegant. I guess some people really enjoy a rousing game of “one of these things is not like the other one!”

No, the actual logic is that people are fiercely protective of the single visitor spot. OK, then, with the aid of stickers, we’ll be able to see if the person in that spot is a resident using it for selfish purposes, like leaving a second car there for twenty minutes while he drops something off. Then I suppose we must take down the license number, go look it up in the office, and nail a dead woodchuck to his door. Or perhaps we can arrange a time to stand around with torches and pitchforks. This time will be arranged using the Yahoo! Group. No, it can’t be Sunday night, because Shelly is going to be out of town! This is too bad. Shelly loves a good public whipping. Hey guys, if you need me, I’ll be boiling some oil!

You know how to whistle, don’t you, Katie Couric?

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Man, why you gotta go sit on a desk? It’s so…FOX affiliate! Who does a damn thing like that? I can see Anderson Cooper trying it, but would Peter Jennings have done this? I don’t want to see anyone’s knees while they tell me how many people died that day. I do not like news in the round. No walking around the set, please, unless you are discussing something important like Whitney Houston. I prefer the “sit very still at a desk and look apologetic and steely” delivery.

Maybe I am still mad that Katie took all summer to not come up with a sign off. Viewers writing in is just too painfully inclusive for my taste. Viewers are morons! She should have gone with “I’m Katie Couric, and it’s Miller time.” Or “I’m Katie Couric. Balls.” That’s how I feel after watching even five minutes of news. Why do folksy? I used to enjoy watching her on the Today Show, gritting her teeth and flexing her stilettos through endless interviews with gummy-smiling relationship experts. You could just tell how much she loathed it, how much she wanted to wear a flak jacket and do Important News instead. Somewhere, over the focus group….bluebirds fly….

***
My sister and I used to have to play with unfun toys since our parents did not believe in fun. We had unpainted blocks, an abandoned kitchen sink, some dirt, and Cuisenaire® rods. Why, then, after having to fit those stupid rods back in the plastic tray so many times am I unable to properly load the dishwasher? Just last night, I realized bowls go sideways in the back three rows. Oops. No more jamming them in haphazardly around the plate slots. The world is not so rigid as I once thought. Mr. H didn’t know the bowls went that way either.

It’s nice to be reminded I have no idea what I’m doing

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A baby is feeling poorly. She’s having a growth spurt and sprouting some teeth. Perhaps she is also humilated because she wore a sleeper that read “Babys friends * Pets” the other day. These pet friends are a line art dachshund named Pascal and a bunny named Colette. At any rate, her psychic disturbance has netted me a day of screaming whenever she is awake and not eating. This coincides nicely with my house being torn apart from our rearranging binge of the past few days. I’m also supposed to be shipping my worldly possessions to Australia today, and if I don’t make it to the post office, I will get OMG negative feedback times a million! I’m going back to bed.

Ten minutes til Wapner

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After throwing myself off a cliff the other day due to reading the nanny postings on Craigslist (“Little Angles Nanny Service,” anyone?), I was reincarnated as a dung beetle who is doomed to go to the post office every day for the rest of her life. Tomorrow I will go and cast a “Yoga for Your Pregnancy” DVD into the abyss. I can’t say I ever managed to do any of that yoga. Putting on pants becomes entertainment enough at a certain point.

But anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Craigslist is full of the little creatures of nature. And the occasional salacious outing of a wealthy family who stiffed the nanny. I’ve given up on ever selling anything with Craigslist, because one can post all salient details and a photo and still get an email reading “Hi! I want to buy your item! How much is it? How big is it? Will you bring it to my house? What were you selling, anyway?” Of course there are many more misspellings in the actual email. So I’m trying eBay and Half.com to purge our home of useless clutter and Mr. H’s awful CD collection from before he knew me. People ask all sorts of questions on eBay as well, it turns out. Apparently I must not have written my listing in Australian*, as someone wants to me to sort out the cost of shipping. Clearly, I can do this with much more panache than the shipping calculator link at the top of the page. People are so starved for love and attention these days. Let’s heal together.

*I responded pitifully, with the help of the Outback menu: It’ll be a dinkely doo bonzer right Thunder From Downunder $18.75 American dawlahs.