So, What Does Your Husband Do?

I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked this question. Nor can I count how many issues I have with it. For now, I’ll just give you three.

First: I never even notice I sly glance from the questioner to my hand to see if I’m even wearing a ring. So this means the question is an assumption. What if I’m not married and I’m really a single mom? Or what if the ring I am wearing is a family heirloom? How about I’m really a lesbian and don’t have a man in my life at all? (All not true, but can’t possibly be known by a person I’ve just met.) I hate assumptions. Especially ones that don’t revolve around me.

Second: I cannot possibly explain to you what it is my husband does in accurate terms. I have tried and before I’m  halfway through it, eyes start to wander and scan the rest of the room. I can imagine that they are trying to figure out a way to “get out of this one.” So save yourself the trouble and don’t bother asking.

Third: What about me? How about we try asking a female with kids what it is THEY do instead of always referring to the husband? This is where I become mildly insulted. Do I have an aura about me that gives off the vibe of slacker stay at home mom-part time yoga instructor? You’re speaking to me…addressing me…so let the inquiries be about me. And who knows? Maybe we’ll end up somewhere over coffee and then you can ask me what it is my husband does.

Letters to Suburbia VII: Nowhere to Park

Instead of parking in their wrap around driveway that can easily fit five cars, at least, crazy cat lady now parks her two SUV’s on the street to keep me and my husband and whatever friends we might have, in our tiny driveway. 

So, I was thinking, since she’s no longer using her driveway at all, would it be terribly odd if I used it? She’s wasting a perfectly good piece of car-space over there just to prove some kind of point – passive agressively, I might add.

Does she not know that her property line ends at her sidewalk? She’s from PA, so she already has that going against her. Maybe her massive hair extensions are cutting off the circulation in her brain? Maybe she has cellulite of the frontal lobe?

Whatever her problem is, I don’t appreciate coming home late at night and having to circle the neighborhood for a place to park, while her giant SUVs sleep peacefully in front of our house and her driveway lays dark and empty. 

This def put a wrinkle in the vinyasa yoga class I took last night. Soon, she will wake one morning to find Betty (my vw) taking up all the empty space behind her house.

Letters to Suburbia VI

Abby’s dog poop to be deposited all along the crazy cat lady’s side of the fence? I think so. 

Moth balls in my front flower bed so one of her cats can choke on them? 

Totally.

Ten foot high fence? As soon as the funds are available.

Any other suggestions?

Letters To Suburbia V

Dear Crazy Cat Lady Next Door,

Are you serious? You take issue with us doing our yardwork?  Guess what, looney tunes, that fence is mine. And if I want to cut down the weeds overtaking it, I will. Yes, those weeds are Honey Suckle. The blossoms last a mere two weeks and then the fence looks like shit. You’re going to have a heart attack the day I replace this crappy fence and your precious weeds are carted away. Something I can’t wait to see.

Next time you approach me like this: “Hey! Hey! Hey! Don’t cut the honey suckle….or something to that effect, please remember I have a gardening tool of some kind in my hand. 

You’re also one of the few lucky folks on the block to have a drive way that wraps around to the back of your yard. You can fit ten cars back there. I am not so lucky. When people come to my home to socialize, they will park wherever they want. Even if that is in front of your house. So, I don’t appreciate that whenever cars start lining up in my driveway and in front of my house, you bring your car around front and park it smack in the middle of both of our houses to keep parking for my friends and family more difficult. 

Listen. I’m not afraid of your hair extensions that make you look like the cowardly lion from Wizard of Oz. Nor am I terrified by the fact that your are ENORMOUS. What does make me throw up in my mouth a little bit is when you are out front doing your yard work with a moo moo on….bending over so I get a birds eye view of the largest collection of flabby cellulite on the planet. 

The nice girl act is over. I’m a great pretender. I can pretend for years.  But it is so on.

Hybrid-Undead

With all the vampire pop culture being slung around these days like…well…shit, I couldn’t help but develop a NEW theory about my neighbors. My theories come to me right in the middle of that phase of falling asleep but still a little awake. So this might make no sense whatsoever.

My neighbors are vampire hybrids. Let me explain: I’ve been in this hellish wasteland of a suburb for three years, now. And this family next door never comes outside. EXCEPT: at twilight (I know…horrendous pun, but couldn’t resist). The little girl and her brother are playing outside till ten at night. They come out after dinner and just shoot hoops and hoola hoop like it’s freakin high noon.

And the mom: she NEVER leaves the house. Her car sits in the driveway all day long and the windows of her house are all shut up and the shades drawn. I’ve even rung her bell to talk to her in the middle of the day: nothing.

Here’s why they’re hybrids: they subsist not on blood. I have proof: their garbage can is always overflowing with McDonalds.

So they are the almost undead. The kind who sleep all day, and only come out to play at night. Do they have any special powers? Is this why my dog is always barking at them? Can they leap buildings in a single bound?

This is what I was thinking about as I was falling asleep today. Just sayin.

Letters to Suburbia IV

Dear next-door crazycat lady:

I find it VERY impressive that over the hum of the saw  hacking down my tree yesterday, and the limb chopper truck thingy…that I could STILL hear you screaming for your cats.

You have quite a range. Have you considered American Idol try-outs?

An Update (not a correction)

Below mentioned crazy lady WAS arrested after the Wal-Mart incident. But most likely not due to any effort made on the part of Wal-mart employees. Word is, enough bystanders made a to-do while she was being hurredly escorted out of the building by Wal-mart personnel, and to her unfortunate luck, a DYFS employee witnessed the whole thing.

that’s all we have time for today.

9-1-Wal-Mart

This all started out as a very “so, what’s up?” phone call from my friend J to me. Shooting the nonsense. She happens to be in Wal-Mart trying desperately to track down a copy of Madagascar deux. In mid-sentence, I hear, from her end of the line, what sounds like a woman screaming bloody murder ( i don’t think the phrase “bloody murder” is used nearly enough)…kind of like she’s either screaming for someone to help her or for someone to leave her be. In any case, it made the hairs on my head stand at attention and I was just getting it second hand.

Me: J? Is everything ok? Hello? J?

Phone: dead.

I remember that J said her mom was with her. So I call up the mom who’s waiting in the parking lot for J to come out when she’s done. I recommend to mom that she get into the Wal-Mart because something did not sound right at all in there.

tick tock tick tock tick…please don’t let that person have a gun…tick tock…please don’t let J do anything silly…tick tock….

Finally:

Screaming crazy lady was, in fact, beating on her four year old son while I listened via cell phone call. Folks tried intervening, including J who tried to convince the woman that she was going to jail and she’d never see her kid again. Crazy lady told J and everyone else to mind their own business (in a many colored spectrum kind of way).

Cell phones flip open, cops are called, Wal-Mart management freaks out and escorts the lady and her son back to their car so as to avoid any unnecessary liability issues.

That’s right, folks. Instead of trying to keep the woman there, instead of trying to get a lisence plate number, instead of doing anything at all that might secure the welfare of a little boy, Wal-Mart went into CYA mode. The woman and her son are gone before police can even get there.

This happened at the Wal-Mart in the Hamilton Marketplace on Rt 130 Hamilton, NJ. Just in case you’re wondering. Just in case you feel like never shopping there again. Just in case you needed one more reason to hate Wal-Mart.

Letters to Suburbia III: Live Free or Die

To whom it may concern:

Just exactly why am I paying any taxes at all, here?

 The potholes multiply overnight, the snow plow has become an endangered species, and I hear more disturbing things about the schools than I care to get into seeing as I have many friends who are great teachers, but I do not live next door to one of those.

New Hampshire sounds like a better idea more and more everyday. Sure, I would be carving an existence out of the environment with my bare hands, most likely. At least there’s some self-satisfaction in that. My complaints would probably be about the moose in my driveway that won’t budge, instead of potholes. Now, that’s what I call exciting.

What I’m getting at is: if one moved to a place like New Hampshire, they would have no one to blame but themselves for a crappy existence and so a job ,will more times than not, get done. Whereas, here, we always have someone else to blame…a finger to point. And so NOTHING gets accomplished. Just a perpetual passing of the buck.

In any case, I would really like to see a snow plow once in a while. Or give me back my money.

“…a considerable amount of bullshit”

..so says Frank Wheeler to his wife, April, on page 33 of the novel Revolutionary Road.

I’m not using it in the same context, but it did strike me as hilarious when I read it, and I’ve been looking to use it as much as possible ever since, and so it has become the title of this blog; which will contain it’s own considerable amount of bullshit.

Let’s start in AC last Thursday night: I decide to get out of my sister’s car at a stop light to give the remnants of our dinner to a homeless woman. Let me just say: her make-up was impeccable…the homeless woman’s.

She looked every bit the bag lady from far away…lots of..bags..picking crap up off the ground as she hobbled along. Why wouldn’t she want some left over calamari? She was very grateful, and her lipstick was a great shade of red.

Meanwhile, my sister is laying on the horn for me at the corner. Upon hearing this horn, the local hooker begins sprinting toward the car, yelling over her shoulder to her friend that she will catch up with her later, because she “has to get this”. The hooker and I lock eyes in confusion as we realize we are both trying to make our way to the same car. She says to me very sweetly: Oh honey, is that for you? (pointing to my sister).  Then I say: Yes. but that’s my sister…not…. At this point she gets what’s going on, and making her apologies, struts away fabulously in some pretty killer boots.

Oh. And lest I forget the best part of this entire exchange: she was really a he. (if only i had half his sense of style) Since all of this is going on outside of the car, Ally is oblivious that she was seconds away from being propositioned. I give a horrible explanation of what almost took place once I get back in the car, because I’m working off of one Klonopin, a pain killer for a migraine, some brunello and hysterical tear-laden laughter. And I realize in my silly stupor, that one can feel themselves dying slowly from the inside out of they go too many days without laughing as hard as I was.

The next morning, we’re dining on some room service before our massages:

Me: how are your eggs?

Allyson: cold.

Me: you’re so cynical.

We had “plans” to hit the gym and the pool after the massages and the steam room. Of course, we opted for naps all day long and marathon episodes of The Dog Whisper, during which at some point Ally becomes convinced that I, myself, could have made an excellent dog trainer. And I agree.

And then some wind energy.

Yay for cable on Sunday nights! Lesbians and Mormons. My favorite combo.

I’ll close with a little something from my current reading:

“It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about. Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstances might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”