This week I’m preparing two presentations for which I just realized I have no qualifications. One’s on effective use of Powerpoint, the other is on social media for service organizations.
I get a lot of requests for my so-called expertise. I don’t ever say no, so it’s probably my fault it keeps happening (A note to my clients: … I mean in my volunteer life. I am totally credentialed for my day job – with a certificate that didn’t come from a Cracker Jack box).
I really thought I’d be able to get a video of my cute skin doctor, Steve, saying “use sunscreen, you dumb dorks,” but he wouldn’t agree to saying something that straightforward, even when I told him it was for the children.
And there’s some restriction that has to do with HIPAA or something, so I couldn’t take any kind of video of him and his assistant in his office this morning.
You’re not going to get to see how cute he is. Sorry.
In November, 2012, I had a huge basal-cell carcinoma removed from the left side of my nose via a procedure called Mohs.
Don’t worry, the doctor told me, no one has ever lost a day of her life from this type of cancer. So I blithely went about my routine, scheduled a family trip to Guatemala, as well as a presentation in front of a couple hundred people, and another half marathon.
Okay, the doctor said, maybe you should worry a little more than that.
The Muzzy Braun show was sold out by the time we arrived on Saturday, which is how we ended up at a belly dance performance instead.
The last time our friend Sally was in town, I recommended a contemporary theater play that that turned out to be too avant-garde for anyone else’s taste. This time I didn’t make suggestions.
I was all about going with the flow.
I love the raised eyebrows I get when I tell people I’m a Little League umpire. I wonder how many times in my life I’ve been so motivated by such a reaction.
I’m certainly not compelled because I’m the mom who drops everything for her kid. I don’t have time to fill and I don’t actually like sports. I was the girl in high school PE who flinched when the ball came at her. I haven’t checked since to see if I’ve improved. Until recently, I’m not sure I’d ever worn a mitt.
I hope to save my kids from this fate by constantly exposing them to sports. At the slightest mention of interest, I sign them up. But kids sports require parental involvement, and I can’t afford a stunt double.
At the parent meeting for Colin’s first season in Little League, the coach passed around sign-up sheets. The snack form was full when it got to Mike and me. I signed up to sell raffle tickets. Then coach asked for two umpire volunteers.
I have friends who are so precise about parenting it makes me wonder if there was a class along the way that Mike and I missed. Most of our parenting tactics were passed along to us by the way we were parented, a small few we adopted by virtue of the way we wish we were parented. At one point in our parenting journey I was into reading books about parenting. I had all of the “What to Expect” books, Dr. Spock, Baby Signs, and a few of the pop psychology tomes about the inner workings of the adolescent and pre-adolescent brain. I read about Love and Logic™ and actually practiced it for a few weeks before I regressed into the “Better Parenting Through Screaming and Yelling” style that I had heretofore perfected.
At one point, when Colin was little, I apologized to him for a particularly bad parenting moment. Parents are fallible, which is something I admit to my children readily, and for which I’ve asked forgiveness more than once.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve only just started this parenting thing and I’m still working at it.”
Ever the one for logical, if disturbingly inappropriate solutions, Colin responded: “Well, why didn’t you and dad train with a hobo kid first before you had me?”
Actually, the concept of a “test baby” has occurred to a number of prospective parents. Then they get a dog. Which all their friends who are already parents think is stupid. Dogs are far more forgiving than children. They won’t tell their teacher how you used the “F” bomb when your hair dryer broke before work. They don’t require explanations about what you and dad were doing in the bedroom when they barged in on Sunday morning. They’re not picky eaters or tattle tales. They don’t need help with homework.
We did, in fact, get a dog in order to prepare for parenthood. A black lab, who was bigger than I am and sure he was smarter. Come to think of it, “Hobo” would have been a good name for him. But I digress.
There are nuanced situations in parenting that may well be outlined in dozens of parenting books. When it comes right down to it, faced with such a situation four out of five parents will forget what they’ve read. This is because many of these touchstone moments happen in the life of a young parent when they’re also coping with:
– too little sleep
– too much to drink
– low blood sugar, or
– are in a rush to get to somewhere on time,
….Or some combination of two or more of these factors (one hopes not the drinking and rushing to get somewhere on time).
Here’s how our family coped with a common parenting challenge: “The Santa question.”
Step I – Wait until the subject comes up on its own ….
We were driving home from an Easter celebration at my in-laws when Colin dropped the question:
“Is there really an Easter Bunny?”
It IS ridiculous: an oversized, pink rabbit delivering eggs. What kid even likes eggs? The candy thing is reasonable, but then there’s the gruesome rite of eating said bunny in chocolate effigy. And then there’re marshmallows. Marshmallows are gross. And which of these traditions has anything to do with the reason we celebrate the holiday? It’s a cumbersome set of rituals to explain.
Our two boys represent opposite sentimentalities: the pragmatic and the sympathetic. Colin was and still is Mr. Pragmatism. At age six, he knew rabbits don’t come in shades of pink, dragging overflowing baskets of goodies to give away. In fact, bunnies don’t take kindly to being chased or picked up. They bite. They have fleas and zero personality.
Our older son is pure emotion. Like his mom, Jack will tear up at movies about dogs, and commercials about cup-of-coffee-a-day children in Africa. Not normally a tidy person, he could nevertheless be persuaded to pick up his toys as a toddler when I told him they actually felt more comfortable in their proper places, or maybe with children who would care enough about them to put them away.
Our family tradition for Easter calls for mimosas at brunch, likely followed by a couple of beers under a warmish spring sun while older kids hide eggs that the younger kids nearly kill each other to find later. There’s an early dinner with way too much food, some wine, and good conversation with family. By the time we pack up to leave, the kids are well on their way to a sugar crash and I am in serious need of a nap. Which leads us to:
Step II – When asked a direct question, answer with whatever stupid thing comes into your head ….
Which in my case was: “No, there actually really isn’t any Easter Bunny.”
At this point, Mr. Pragmatic was fully engaged in dismantling an empty Pez dispenser and no longer paying attention, but 10 year-old Jack had a follow up:
“I suppose now you’re going to tell us there’s no Santa either,” he said.
“No, honey. I’m sorry. No Santa.”
“No Tooth Fairy either, then.”
Jeez, I couldn’t catch a break. “No, no tooth fairy.”
I can’t recall specifics from this point, it was about three years ago. I know there were tears and accusations. And later, when the occasion warranted, my little people were far less willing to wait in a long line for a photo opportunity with the guy in a red suit than they had been previously.
It may have seemed to some that we drug the Santa myth out way too long anyway. I didn’t have a firm example to go on for the revelation process and hadn’t thought to make a plan. The Santa tradition I grew up with consisted of my mom staying home to “wash the dishes after dinner,” while we would go visit a neighbor on Christmas Eve. She would later join us, having stepped out of the house at the very moment before Santa arrived, ala Bruce Wayne and Batman. I knew that she had something to do with the Santa process well before I was Jack’s age. I was alarmed one year when mom walked to the neighbor’s house with us after dinner instead of lagging behind. My parents had arranged for a friend to drop off and display our shiny new bikes in the living room for us to discover when we returned.
My parents continued to address presents to us and to each other as “from Santa” well into our adulthood. My dad was the source of the sentimentality that’s been passed through me to Jack and I’m sure he never found the heart to be direct about the Santa situation. Or, more likely, no one had ever told him there was no Santa …
Step III – Duck and cover until things calm down
So time passes and we bumble our way through to the next holiday season. We no longer have to buy special wrapping paper for the presents that were brought by Santa in the middle of the night. We don’t have to intercept Santa before the kids present a list of demands for outrageous gifts they are never going to get. We don’t get to threaten to call the big guy as punishment for bad behavior.
But when March rolls around, I catch Mr. Pragmatic upstairs with a box and a stick with a string trying to rig a trap. I help him set it and stack a few crackers under the box, with some “gold” costume jewelry and other sparkly things sure to tempt a Leprechaun.
The kids go to bed and Mike and I gleefully prepare a scrap of green felt to be artfully trapped under the sprung trap, the goodies scattered across the carpet as if dropped in a moment of panic by a fleeing verdant pagan. Mike stops me before I use green poster paint to leave footprints on our carpet.
In the morning, Colin will wake up and enthusiastically buy into our ruse. He’ll tuck that scrap of cape in with his other treasurers and keep it for years. It is a memento of childhood and magic representation of mischief, raucous behavior, and lack of impulse control with an Irish fairy’s tolerance for green beer and love of bawdy, off-color limericks.
Because, in our house, Leprechauns make so much more sense than the Easter Bunny, fat guys with fake beards or kindly sprites who sometimes forget to leave cash under your pillow when you’ve lost a tooth.
Some two or three decades ago my freckled skin and I became good friends with Hawaiian Tropic, SPF 4 in my pursuit of the teen ideal of beauty. Despite my determination to transform my natural skin tone from its normal translucent hue that would have been coveted in Victorian-era England, I never really tanned. In the years since I have learned to balance my grudge against the lotion industry and its failure to deliver on promises of bronze perfection, with my disdain for my inherited pallor.
Sometime several months ago, I absent-mindedly picked at patch of dry skin on the left side of my nose, creating a small sore that stayed for weeks. A scab would form, which would wash off in the shower, or slough off when I ran and rubbed the sweat off my face with my sleeve.
The kids were astonished this year when I suggested we see the new Batman movie instead of going to the fair. They stood astride their bikes, staring gap-mouthed at me. They couldn’t believe I would cancel the FAIR.
“This just ruins my day,” Colin said. I hastily added movie candy and a trip to the arcade to the package.
Not only do the kids love the fair, I love the fair. Or I HAVE loved the fair. Every year in the weeks leading up to the fair, I excitedly point out the colorful trucks of unassembled carnival rides queued up in the fairgrounds parking lot we pass on our way to the grocery store.
“Look,” I say, taking my hands off the wheel to clap excitedly “the fair, The Fair, THE FAIR!”
For the past several years, a trip to the fair has been my birthday present. I love wrapping my hands around that first beer and corn dog, then dragging my family around to look at every single exhibit in the expo building: the oversized produce, the amateur photography, the carvings, the quilts, the jars of canned peaches. This is followed by a trip to the animal barn to appease anyone tired of the aforementioned expo displays of agricultural expertise and pining over future carnival rides and games. After rows of guinea pigs, chickens, rabbits and the chick incubator, I can usually stretch the visit out to include the horse and llama stables.
In the days before kids, and even when they were still very young, we could skip the rides and games altogether. These were the years when my love of the fair was at its peak. It was wholesome and inexpensive.
The Fair and I also have a debauched history. For a teen in the 80s, the fair was an easy place to get away with mischief fueled by a fast food soda cup filled an unhealthy ratio of diet coke to Jack Daniels. It was open late, teeming with other teenagers, and someplace my parents thought was safe enough to leave me unsupervised.
The Fair and I matured together and it became an inexpensive date for my husband and me in the days when we couldn’t afford most other forms of entertainment. As our household discretionary income grew we still enjoyed the Fair.
When our kids came along, we did what we always do and dragged them along. We liked measuring their height against the ruler posted at the ticket booth. We said no to cotton candy and all the peddlers pawning plastic crap. We said yes to those few carnival rides the kids were tall enough to enjoy. We returned home, happily sunburned and exhausted.
Somehow we’ve graduated from buying a handful of carnival tickets to buying the all-you-can-ride, non transferable, wrist bands for our kids. Although we are well beyond the time when we couldn’t put two coins together and walk to the convenience store for a candy bar, the expense makes me itch.
Now a trip to the fair means we rush through the displays of grandma’s cookie recipe and the 800 pound pumpkin to stand in the shade-free, sour-smelling trampled grass, watching our kids wait in a 25-minute line for a three-minute ride.
Access to the carnival rides is through the carnival games with the carnival carnies, which is another problem. The boys love the games and won’t believe they’re rigged. What’s more, kiddie games at the fair have cultivated our children with easy winnings from early on so that they’ll always believe they’re capable of hitting a little balloon with a dart. The games offer prizes like live goldfish that parents get to lug around in sealed, plastic baggies for the rest of the afternoon. Said plastic baggies tend to cook the little fish in the full sun, so the afternoon ends with Mike and me certain we’ve been consigned to hell for abetting animal cruelty.
With so much to offer, the fair entry fee and expensive wrist bands are non refundable, which is not usually a problem. Two years ago, though, we dragged our foreign exchange student along with us for this uniquely American experience. By “uniquely American,” I mean: “I don’t know for sure if they have county fairs or the equivalent in Europe or if they just gather regularly dancing around maypoles and eating turkey legs and jousting.” Even with the advanced discount tickets I purchased, five fair entries, wristbands and dinner for all of us cost roughly the same amount as my first car.
I dragged everyone through the expo exhibits and the small animal barn. Then, in an attempt to out-run what looked like an incoming storm, we skipped the horse stables and went straight to the big Ferris wheel. From there we’d be able to see the whole city, and impress our foreign guest with the juxtaposition of vistas of the Boise River to one side with a five-lane, sidewalk-less arterial roadway littered with back lit marquees and broad parking lots to the other.
We waited in line for our requisite 25 minutes as the wind picked up. The kids were complaining of being hungry, but the fair would be open for several more hours on this last night of the season and we could break later for corndogs and elephant ears.
At the point we were entering an undersized gondola on the oversized Ferris wheel, I heard what I thought was a train approaching. I saw the carney’s face turn pale. We turned and saw a wall of dust barreling down the fairway. It pushed banners and entire canopies ahead of it in a cloud of dust. I turned back and looked up at the ride we were about to board and saw it shimmy. Startled faces looked over the edge of their respective gondolas at us on the platform.
“Everybody off!” the carney yelled as he strong armed us back from what now looked like a brightly lit deathtrap. We obliged, ducking flying paraphernalia and entire tents to make our way back to our car through the torrent. No fair food, no $7 beer, our expensive wristbands completely unused. We stopped at a convenience store on the way home to get ice cream. Our exchange student to this day fails to see the attraction of the Fair.
It’s about that time my love of the Fair began to evaporate. I suspect Mike’s interest has long been feigned for my benefit.
Maybe some day when the kids are out of the house, or no longer interested or available to hang out with us (and hopefully have their own respective sources of income), Mike and I will be able to the Fair that I remember loving. This year, however, nearby forest fires have created spectacular sunsets and an atmosphere reminiscent of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The smoke plays havoc with Mike’s allergies, and I’m unwilling to plop down a small fortune for the experience. The Fair has become an expensive , unfulfilling flirtation. The affair is over.
Besides, Christian Bale is my new crush.
A few weeks ago, I was telling a story to a group of friends. It was after a church service and we were stationed to one side of a buffet table trying unsuccessfully to discourage kids from shoving handfuls of cookies into their pockets.
Since my friends know that most of my stories incorporate off color, self-deprecating humor or blatant exaggerations, they probably had good reason for anxiety as our pastor approached. The story I was telling had to do with the night of my 40th birthday, when my husband thought it would be funny to remove his shirt in a crowded gay club before coming to find me. As is probably true of most stories that have to do with drinking and stripping in gay bars, there were moments of poignant humor, and nuances that, left out of the tale, would dramatically alter the narrative.
Our pastor is a pretty cool guy, so is my husband, and I have this weird aversion to altering a story so as to be less offensive. So while my brain may have speedily assessed the wisdom of continuing with such a potentially embarrassing tale depending upon the audience, there was no awkward pause on my part, nor any twitch or indication that I assessed the situation and deemed it acceptable to continue in mixed (holy and not-so-holy) company.
“And so then he said ‘hey, I’m up here,'” I said, pointing at my chest and then to my face. That’s it. Story finished.
There was one beat … two. Someone laughed politely.
Two kids elbowed their way to the table and attacked a plate of snickerdoodles.
Since that moment, the story that’s remembered and retold among members of our congregation is not about Mike’s inebriated shirtless wanderings through downtown Boise, but my retelling of the tale in front of our resident man-of-God.
Okay, it wasn’t the most genteel moment of my life. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to recall ANY genteel moments. Rather, my timeline on this earth is highlighted by spectacular instances of questionable judgement, usually relating to the poorly-timed, off-color comment or patently offensive story.
There was the time I was sharing a moment from the life of a court-reporter friend of mine. She had received a call from a colleague who was transcribing testimony and needed grammatical advice. Midway through my tale, I realized that my story’s bawdy punch line might not fly with the well-healed ladies of the Junior League, but what the heck? The story isn’t funny at all without the last little bit, and so what if it made me come across as a sailor?
“And so my friend called to ask ‘does the term ‘butt-f–ker’ have a hyphen?'”
Well, my anal-retentive, shirtless husband tells me hyphenation in this case is proper when the term is a compound modifier. And yeah, that story was a flop in that particular crowd. On the inside, I’m sure everyone was cracking up, but Junior League ladies don’t often belly laugh unless they have a lot more wine in them.
You can feel however you want about this, but I value a good story over a whole bunch of other stuff, including coming across as well-mannered, or fitting in. If that story incorporates bad language, well, one cannot sacrifice narrative in favor of leaving out a well placed expletive, or embarrassing moment. It doesn’t work. Ask any fan of Battlestar Galactica reruns if they aren’t still brought up short by the shows’ copious use of the word “frack” as the futuristic, FCC clean, curse of choice.
It sounds, well, fracking stupid.
Some stories you just can’t tell well by cleaning them up. And there are times when a well-placed expletive is really funny.
Take the case of the 5 foot tall metal chicken. Not a story you can tell without the F-word. Can’t be done.
That’s not to say one can’t easily overuse expletives. Calling everyone else on the road a jackass is so nonspecific as to render the insult rather pointless. It diffuses the impact and makes you come across as unimaginative. Insults, like humor, should be unexpected, creative and delivered with exceptional timing.
And if that exceptional timing happens to be when your local man of God joins in on the conversation, well the Big Man himself knows you can’t stop a speeding story train.
We had a family friend who would bring her little dog with her everywhere. “Flurry” would sit quietly in her purse until she arrived at her destination, and then run around like a maniac. I never heard of said friend ever warning anyone that she was coming with her dog. Flurry wasn’t a problem, although it seems odd to me now that someone would cart a dog to a friends’ house without asking if it was appropriate.
In our quest to combine active parenting with professional responsibilities and hyperactive volunteeriwsm, we attend a lot of events that cross the line between social and vocational. If we’re unsure whether said event is kid-friendly, we ask. We’re crazy about our kids, but not crazy about taking them with us everywhere we go, particularly if they’re not going to have any fun.
It’s not necessarily because they’re lacking in the social graces that we’re not always jumping at the chance to take them with us. On the contrary, we have a responsibility to expose them to such situations regularly, so that if they do ever get a date to prom, they don’t accidentally use the soup spoon for the crème brûlée, or initiate an armpit fart competition. And babysitters run $7 to $10 an hour. Who needs to throw money away? But given a chance, we enjoy a kid-free night as much as any sane adult.
Other parents get this, and many, whether they’re parents or not will offer helpful information up front by saying something like “it’s an adult night,” or “the Henson’s are bringing their rugrats, so why don’t you bring yours so they can hang out together and not bother us?”
One childless couple offered up this additional tidbit: “oh, our house isn’t kid-friendly.”
I … hmm. An image comes to mind of a room with cement floors and a drain in the middle, or a stable with straw bedding that you can shovel up and replace when it gets dirty.
To be honest, kids, if given any length of time in one place, will destroy their surroundings. They’re constantly engaged in taking things apart to make other things, like taking cushions of the couch to make forts, then leaving those cushions on the floor for the dog to sleep on. They like science, and will test the relative tensile strength of, oh say an area rug compared with metal kitchen shears, or that sharp-edged toy sheriff’s badge against the oak dining room chair.
This propensity for destruction, our kid-raising books tell us, is a part of a child’s development. It’s also a form of extortion. If you don’t want to see your furniture destroyed, you better invest in building blocks and science kits and finger paints, and probably stuff that involves confetti and other garbage that will sooner or later be left all over your living room floor, to the point where it won’t matter if your furniture is destroyed because the place will look like a tornado just swept through a trailer park anyway.
That this familiarity with the whole extortion process plays an important role in the development of the parents, is an ugly truth that the child-rearing gurus will leave out. Early on in a child’s life, he learns that there are rewards (or bribes, or ransom, depending upon the extent of your cynicism) for good behavior. If there is not going to be a built-in, kid-oriented entertainment at any particular event, it’s best to know up front. Some things cost more than parents want to pay. It’s one thing to bribe your toddler into silence during a church service with a mega-sized sucker every week, and quite another to have to sit through an afternoon at the local arcade with your 9 year-old who unwillingly attended your last PTA meeting that ran 90 minutes longer than expected.
Which brings me back to my childless friend, whose inadvertent insult makes me wonder what she would think of MY home, which, while lacking either cement flooring or straw bedding, still requires furniture to be strategically placed to hide the results of the botched blue food coloring/baby oil experiment, or the scissor hole cut in my couch. And as I heard one childless couple comment when they thought I wasn’t listening, there is also a certain smell to a home with children. In our case, it’s eau de gym socks, overcooked bacon and dog slobber.
The fact is, whether or not it’s true, I don’t want to hear whether your house is kid friendly. I want to hear if the evening is going to cost me $40 bucks and a lost hour at Wahooz this weekend.
And, since we’re being brutally honest, I’m already jealous enough of your kid-unfriendly home to want to take a pair of scissors to your couch. You know. Just to test the tensile strength of your upholstery.
There are things I love about social media, not the least of which is the extent to which it feeds my need for attention. Sometimes that same narcissism is the foundation of one of the reasons I DON’T like social media: it occasionally makes me confront the fact that I need to be liked, and come to grips with how much it bugs me when I’m not.
I love the friendships I’ve rekindled on Facebook. I had no idea I’d ever reconnect with so many ex-boyfriends outside of a drunk dialing marathon. There are several acquaintances I’m happy to get to know better, and friends from the past I’ve missed dearly.
I’ll not pretend to be one of those people who doesn’t check her Facebook account several times a day. I don’t have a water cooler at which to hang out and find out what’s going on.
To all of you who like to rave: “ooh, Facebook, who has time for all that nonsense? Who cares what you had for dinner or what your cat threw up?” Whatever. I love it. The pictures of the toll-painted holiday crafts, the announcements of who read what fan-mag article, the restaurant where you enjoyed lunch. the pithy quote from Yogi Berra, the not so pithy quote from your kid. Bring it on. I’ll read it. Maybe twice.
I’ll sometimes block content that I feel is too political (rare) or offensive (even more rare), but for the most part, friends contributing to my news feed provide a refreshingly broad array of perspectives and insights – sometimes droll, sometimes funny, sometimes just a blur of color as I scroll quickly by.
Then there’s Casey. In the 9th grade, Casey and I were briefly an item, but only in the academic sense, meaning there was no kissing, a little hand-holding, and daily notes passed when we walked to fifth period. Casey was tall, with a gigantic Adam’s apple. He played the trumpet, or trombone, or some wind instrument that has a spit valve. He shared my affinity for unicorns and called every evening at exactly 7:00 pm for a 20 minute chat. That is all I remember about our relationship – that and the fact that I broke up with him in one of my pre-5th period notes.
When we reconnected on Facebook some 25 years later, I was happy to learn that he had a successful career as a music professor at a local private college, and had a wife and three children.
He also was a strident evangelical libertarian, and was the most vociferous of all my Facebook friends in his posts. Aside from quoting some of the most gloomy scripture I’d ever read, he didn’t say anything patently offensive. He also appreciated the humor in my status updates – especially those about my habit of sending the kids off to school while covering Barbara Streisand classics in my fuzzy white robe and slippers from our porch. Casey liked Babs, apparently.
Then one day the stream of hell-fire stopped abruptly. Casey had “unfriended” me.
Me: funny, irreverent, careful to screen out anything remotely depressing, negative or political. Me.
Casey: angry, Ron Paul supporting, pro-gun, pro-hell-and-damnation with a gigantic Adam’s apple. Casey.
Casey. Unfriended. Me.
My discovery of this kicked off an afternoon of forensic Facebooking the likes of which I had no time for. What in my funny, trite posts had offended Casey? Was he trying to get back at me for 9th grade? Didn’t I even warrant the courtesy of a note?
Since, as I’ve said, Casey had been kind enough to comment on many of my posts, I could go back through my news feed and more or less find where his feedback had ended abruptly.
Early this summer I posted a picture of a young musician playing on a park stage during an outdoor music festival. He had the kind of long blonde “do” that my friends and I used to swoon over while watching videos of White Snake on MTV. The photo I posted of him I had captioned “yum.”
Classy, huh? But not as much as the photo I was going for, which would have framed him beyond the large micro brew in my hand, with my painted toes on bare feet stretched out in the grass. My little phone wasn’t able to capture that particular scene.
Commenting on this cute musician was something that I thought would illicit comments from friends my age who had either swooned over long-haired hooligans or been swooned over because of the length of their locks. After a couple of beers, this seemed like a fun conversation starter.
A note on drinking and posting: Ever since I’d had the opportunity to rethink one of my more ill-timed and snarky comments about children in the Gifted and Talented Program (which mine aren’t), the morning after I’d made it on Facebook, I resolved to avoid publicly airing grievances after imbibing. My judgement is terrible after a couple of beers, and I hate making public apologies. I’d sworn off drinking and posting, until this incident.
So, here I am. Minus one less Facebook friend. I don’t know if I’m more intrigued by the irony of being shunned by the purveyor of the Prince of Peace, or irked because his threshold for taking offense is so low.
I’m also kind of sad because there is now one less person out there waiting to hear about my latest Funny Girl impression.
