♫♪ Talkin' about my generation ♫♪

The last few days I've had to sit back and laugh as I watch all the "Generation Wars" ramping up, much like the "MommyBlogger Wars" a few years ago.

I can't even keep track of what generation I'm supposed to be, GenX I guess because really that one sounds the coolest so it probably is mine.
Also WTF even is Generation Jones? Because apparently I'm at the tail end of that as well, being born in 1968.

I'm going with JoneX. That's my generation.
If you're cool enough I'll let you use that for yourself but don't hold your breath.

My generation is punk and goth and indie music. It's huge hair and cutout sweatshirt necks. It's layered tank tops and leg warmers and shiny metallic jazzercise tights. It's British Knights and Kaepa tennies with the upside down laces. It's bulky thigh length sweaters over turtlenecks with sweater skirts over long john pants. It's clove cigarettes and Strawberry Hill wine. Culottes and (American style) knickers, prairie blouses, Jams shorts and Jellies shoes. It's fingerless lace gloves and layered tutus over torn fishnets with combat boots. It's poodle perms and big round frames for our glasses, sparkly blue eyeshadow and green mascara, banana clips and feathering combs and those stretchy round plastic comb-like headbands.

We were weird and unique and we liked it that way. I still do.

I mean seriously WE are the only ones who ever learned how to actually program a VCR to videotape multiple soap operas on multiple channels during the day while we were in high school/college classes and then program them to tape movies off HBO, Showtime and Skinemax so we could watch all the movies when we were stuck at home and not out carousing and cruising The Strip with our friends.
WE ALONE could squeeze that fourth movie on that VHS tape by carefully running back the credits to the end of the movie, and starting the next at that SPLIT SECOND after the HBO logo ended at the beginning of the next movie, all using three remote controls for TV, VCR, and cable box.

TOP THAT, YOU ROKU FIRESTICK DVRers with your fancy voice controls!

Also we had the bestworst music. You either love it or you lovehate it, and even the country music was so much better.

I know we all think our own was probably the best (and although I don't really like kids of any age, I find the current group of youngsters/young adults are bright and tolerant and learning to fight for their right to paaaaaartay what's right)... but I mean really, in the grand scheme of Things That Actually Affect Your Really For Real Life...does it matter?

It appears that ALL the generations have some things in common, like the willingness to argue over EVERY. DAMN. STUPID. THING. EVER and also take themselves far too seriously in the broadest generalizations.
Have we just run out of better things about which to argue?
Is this like why Hollywood keeps making the same exact movies over and over, like we truly need YET ANOTHER WHOLE VERSION/GENERATION OF A CHARLIE'S ANGELS MOVIE OMG NO THANK YOU PLEASE!

Some of y'all need to just

SNL Simma Down Now GIF from Snl GIFs

Cloak of Invisibility

Sometimes I wish I could fade into invisibility. No fuss, no fanfare, just quietly fade away (from the internet, I mean). Disappear myself. Relax away from reading about perfect lives and food pictures and lolcatz and "too funny!" comments on the most unfunny of posts. Relief from petty envy. Of course then I think that no one would ever notice that I was gone and worse, no one would miss me. Or if they did eventually notice, it would be like "hey, whatever happened to that one girl? You know, hated everyone, weird, sometimes funny...what was her name?" Then my ego goes all Breakfast Clubby and starts singing "DON'T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME!" and yelling "I AM HERE! I AM HERE! I AM HERE!" much like the Whos whom Horton hears.
HEY I HAVE VERY COMPLEX EMOTIONS.

Stream Of Consciousness - A brief & uncensored peek into my brain.

I dare you to try it. Close your eyes like you're preparing to meditate and just type whatever floats across your mind. No peeking! Ready? Okay. Now what? I can't think of anything because I'm tryig to think of something. I think this is why I stopped blogging. No, actually I think I stopped because I started making more friends and then my family started reading and I started caring what people thought. I mean I've always sort of cared what people think about what I write, but I don't get all weird about it because I typically try to offset my bitchiness with a litle humor and oh shit I think I just made a typo. OMG what if my fingers were on the wrong keys all along and this is a bunch of gibberish? Did I spell gibberish correctly? I wnat to peek but I won't cheat. OH cheating. I could write something about that. This will probably be the longest paragraph ever, sort of like one of Danielle Steele's paragraphs only without eleventy three commas per sentence. But she makes millions so I guess maybe I should try doing things her way. I wonder if anyone else ever picks up a Danielle Steele book and thinks well, I wonder who is giong to die or get maimed first? Because that seems to be a recurring theme, not to mention all the broken hearts that happen. Where was I going with that? Diphenhydramine. I don't even know what that is or why I just htought of it. I wonder if I spelled it correctly? WTF am I even thinking about? I am clearly a lunatic.

Your turn - I triple-dog dare you.

blah blah blah

I just deleted my paragraph for today because it was very ranty and I wasn't in the mood to take any shit from anyone over it. So instead, I decided to tell you about my paragraph for tomorrow. Many years ago (some of you will remember because you participated!) I did a little thing here with "Stream Of Consciousness" typing - close your eyes (NO LOOKING at the keyboard or the monitor!) and just type whatever thoughts are going through your head at that moment. It's a fun little peek into your thought process. It doesn't have to mean anything or even make sense, but I invite you all to try it and drop me an email or FB message so I can look into your brain for a minute or two. Right now I'm trying to decide if I should do mine before or AFTER coffee. Maybe I'll do both.

Blogging Nostalgic

See, I have had a whole post in my head for weeks (only I'm mostly too lazy to actually, you know, TYPE it because I type type type type type for my job) about missing blogging.
Oh, I know people still do it, some are still successful with it, even I do it sometimes... but I mean five or six years ago before the world Moved On and blogging became more about Making Money and Social Media. Before conferences actually had WHOLE SESSIONS devoted to teaching you how to answer "What's Your Blog About?" in the time it takes for an elevator ride (no kidding. ACTUAL SESSIONS.).

**which, by the way, is a completely asinine question for olde-tyme bloggers like me. How do you answer that when you're a mom but not a mommyblogger and you tell stories in real-time from your life and try drunk-blogging experiments and share old stories and made-up or embellished stories and complain about getting buttsecksed by the power company every summer and post a bunch of random snippets of thought that sometimes strike you as funny and you post them and hope someone else thinks they're as funny as you do and you vent about the state of the country and you throw in some product and book reviews - some compensated with free goods and some just because you feel like it and you make up games for your readers to play along with you and so on and so forth. 
So I guess what I mean is IF YOU SEE ME IN AN ELEVATOR, DO NOT ASK ME WHAT I BLOG ABOUT OR I MIGHT KICK YOU IN THE NUGGETS.

I miss the days when we (and by "we" I mean "me and most of my blogroll") were not a niche, but a community. I know that many of us just don't have the time we did before. We have to work more hours or our kids have more activities or we got burnt out or just simply ran out of things we wanted to write about.
But I miss US.
Before there were "niches" you had to fall into. Before it was too hard to find an actual post in the midst of all the advertisements. Before "experts" expected us to have a centralized theme in 90% of our posts.
Before memes were a lolcat picture with some snarky remark (hey, I'm not saying I don't like those, but I don't understand how they came to be called memes). I miss memes that look like this. And even when we hated them, we did them anyway BECAUSE OUR FRIENDS TOLD US TO. And secretly, we sort of loved the memes.
I miss silly made-up blog awards that we gave each other. I miss Thursday Thirteens and Wordless Wednesdays.
I miss how we worked on promoting and linking each other instead of only concentrating on an obscene amount of self-promotion. I miss those of us who loved the comments but didn't overly concern ourselves with becoming "popular" or "SuperBloggers".

For my own blog, I miss how I would think of a REALLY AWESOME TITLE...and the blog post would evolve around that. I miss how I always had something to say and wasn't worried about who might take exception to me saying it...because rarely did anyone do that.

Well what the hell, I guess I wasn't too lazy to type it all out after all.
Blame Golfwidow - she was the catalyst because she was kind enough to Bring Back The Meme/Award and tag me in it (TAG! You're it! I miss that too).

If you're still Olde Skool blogging and I haven't been there lately, I'm sorry. Be old-fashioned and leave a comment here instead of facebook or twitter...and I'll come visit. Promise.

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NOW THEN.
the rules:

1. Link the award to the person who gave it to me..
2. Answer questions about myself.
3. Nominate up to 10 bloggers for this award, and link my nominees to the post and comment on their blog, letting them know about the award. (and thank you again for the Award!)

1. Favorite number: Okay, these are maybe not the most awesome meme questions in the land. My favorite right now is NUMBER ONE. Meaning ME.

2. Favorite non-alcoholic drink: Why would anyone ever drink such a thing?? I guess I'll have to say coffee, without which I would not be the person I am today.

3. Favorite animal: What is the biggest, meanest one that eats people? That one.

4. Facebook or Twitter?: Both. And neither. *sigh* There is no lesser of two evils in this question.

5. My passion: gone but not forgotten. Oh, wait...what are YOU talking about?

6. Favorite day of the week: Every one on which I wake up.

7. Favorite flower: that little skunk from Bambi. Or lilacs. I have lilac bushes around my house and they smell divooooon

Now, the inevitable and fearsome TAG and more importantly, the AWARD that goes with it (and be a sport and go all nostalgic with me and play along):
Incurable Insomniac
Mamacita
Redneck Diva
Under The Willow Tree
Simply Sassy
Megan, Grrl Author
Thumper
Webkittyn

And anyone else who'd like to play along. Granting yourself an award is totes allowed.

The One In Which I Get All Yelly And Mean And Offend People

(well, maybe it's not the FIRST one in which I've gotten ranty and mean)

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Okay, so the other day I was on Twitter and someone in my stream was involved in a conversation with people that I do not follow. I was interested enough to click through a few people (whom I ALSO do not follow) and came across some dude who was getting all judgy and shouting "HEY PEOPLE QUIT BITCHING ABOUT MISSING OUT ON SOCIAL EVENTS BECAUSE YOU HAVE KIDS! FAMILY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING! I WOULD GIVE UP ALL SOCIAL EVENTS IF I HAD MY KIDS FULL TIME!"
Or words to that effect.
And I agree - family IS the important thing.


But here's the what: You DON'T have your kid(s) full time. You have ZERO FUCKING IDEA what it's like to have your kids with you 24 hours a day. ZERO. NONE. NADA.
You're FREE to flit about at a moment's notice. You're free to drop what you're doing when your friends call and say HEY MEET ME AT THE BAR/RESTAURANT/BEACH/WHATEVER.
You don't have to have 3 weeks advance notice so that you can arrange a babysitter.

Also? If you have "regular" or "normal" kids that you can leave alone, you STILL have no idea what MY life is like.

I realize that we ALL have things we take for granted, even when we don't mean to. But I resent people who think like THAT guy trying to make people like me (oh, not ME personally, I don't even know the dude) feel bad for occasionally wishing for a short escape from family.

My twins just turned 15... and I have been a single parent for about 13 of those years.
My son is severely disabled, as most of you know -- he's like an infant. He doesn't do anything for himself, he can't hold a cup, he has to be fed and lifted and carried and diapered.

You can image the number of babysitters, including family, who are just CLAMORING to sit for me. Uh huh.

(If you guessed "NONE", you would be correct)(that is NOT A COMPLAINT, it is a simple FACT)

Besides the fact that I can't AFFORD a nanny or babysitting service, not many people want to be responsible for watching a kid who is heavy but has to be lifted, who has to be cared for as though he is a 3 month old, who has a seizure disorder.
They say "it's scary". And so it is.

I AM NOT COMPLAINING. I AM SUPREMELY HAPPY AND THANKFUL FOR EVERY DAY THAT MY CHILDREN DRAW BREATH. I am not blaming anyone for the way things are, for my situation. I deal with it, I try not to bitch about it very often - it's my job as a parent.

But I am mostly tied to my house. My son is too heavy to carry and he has a special wheelchair, not a regular one that can just fold in half, so it takes about 20-30 minutes just to take it apart to load it in the car.

I go practically NOWHERE except to work while the kids are in school. Or to the grocery store. And for the last 2 years I have been so lucky to get away for a weekend to go to Blogher, and it took at least 2 months of arranging to get THAT figured out, even though it was their FATHER who was to have them at that time.

AND since we're on the subject: working at a daycare, being a camp counselor or a teenage babysitter is a whole different animal than being a parent. The feelings you have are different, the LEVEL of the feelings you have are different, your thought processes are different.

So if I say I'm sad to miss out on this event or that social gathering, don't tell me how I SHOULD act, how I SHOULD feel, how I SHOULD parent.
Don't you DARE imply that I am LESS THAN AN EXCELLENT PARENT simply because I might occasionally say "OH I WISH I COULD GO TO 'this event' OR 'that social gathering'".
You talk to me when you've walked a couple of miles in my shoes. Until then? SHUT YOUR LAMEHOLE.

And also, fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, pal.

ZIP IT.

Next time you get annoyed with your spouse because they didn't make coffee or they picked up the wrong brand of tampons or chicken soup or forgot the milk or burnt your toast.... TAKE A MINUTE TO THINK that if you were a single parent, you'd have had to do all that shit yourself PLUS your regular jobs and parenting stuff.

And then SHUT YOUR HOLE.
Okay?

PHD - Post Holiday Depression

Sometimes I feel like I don't matter.

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I don't say that so that everyone will go OOOH, OF COURSE YOU DO! and give me some validation.
Okay, maybe it is a LITTLE bit.
Sometimes I need validation as much as the next guy...if the next guy is incredibly needy and sometimes wallows in a bottomless pit of zero self-esteem.
It's the holidays and the wintertime getting me down. The upside is that the holiday hoopla is almost over and I can relax a little bit.

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Sometimes I feel left out.

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No, it's NOTHING that you've done/not done that makes me feel this way.
Yes, I have issues about not being good enough or smart enough or well-read enough or pretty enough or (fill in the blank) enough.

I'm not the only one, though, right?
Seriously. You can admit it to me. I won't tell anyone.
Promise.

Which brings me to another issue...I apologize if I've ever made you feel as though you don't matter to me, because you definitely do.

See, a lot of people think that because I don't ask questions and dig and pry into their lives, it means I don't care.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I WANT to know. I want to know the details. I want to be involved, I want to comfort you, and sometimes I just want to know the good gossip.

Some of my friends are quite comfortable with butting in and nosing around and digging into the root of someone else's problems or issues or troubles; I'm just not built that way.

I've always thought that if you WANT to tell me, you will. Also? I don't want to put someone in the position of having to lie to me if they simply do not want me to know something.

NOW I find out that guess what? You WANT to be asked. You WANT me to nag to get at the truth, because it shows that I truly care.

So, I'm sorry that I haven't asked and probed and gotten all up in your bizness.
What's weird is that I've never felt like it was my place to do that to YOU, but I've never minded someone doing it to ME.

But I will step outside my comfort zone and be nosier, because I want you to know that I care and that YOU MATTER TO ME.

Your friendships are the strong, colorful threads that weave the beautiful tapestry of my life.

One of my finest moments.

Well, one of many, many such moments.

When I was a hotel GM I got to go to New Orleans for the first time to help open a new property.
I'm good at that kind of crap.
ANYWAY.

About 15 of us went for dinner at a little hole-in-the-wall cafe that my local counterparts had recommended.

Waitress: "Today's special, y'all got balled shrimp."

Me:: thinking-- did she say balled shrimp? or BALD shrimp? And what the fuck is that anyway?

Me: "Excuse me, does that mean shrimp balls?"

A moment of shocked silence at the table. All eyes turned toward me. Then the roof raised with the sound of laughter.

Then the waitress made it even better when she said (after wiping the tears from her eyes) "No hon, it's where we put the shrimp in a pot and ball it."

OH. BOILED.

Good times.
I am made of Teh Coolness.

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some days I feel invisible.
Even when I'm not trying to use my superpower.

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