Cheez-Its as a Lethal Weapon

As if living with two teenagers isn’t enough to age me on a daily basis (I found my first gray hair the other day, and I still haven’t stopped mourning) they seem to like to find new ways to test their mother’s patience and sanity.

On the note of that single gray hair, if I may digress for just one moment, it has been taunting me all week, silently whispering things in my ear like, “Any day now I will have new friends to keep me company. Remember the other day when the kids were arguing over who should make the Iced Tea, that was worth two new gray friends for me, and then the day right after that when they had a wrestling match in the living room over your son burping in the vicinity of your daughter and blowing it towards her, that was worth at least eight new hairs, or better yet, how about the other night when the ceiling almost caved in because they were upstairs going at each other because your son had once again not cleaned his room, which we all now affectionately call "Jabba's Palace", and your daughter said it smelled like boy, that one alone was worth ten or twenty".

That gray hair taunting me all day is starting to get to me, it's like that movie with Griffin Dunne (can’t think of the name of it right now) where his penis starts talking to him at the most inopportune moments (not that a can think of a good time for your penis to talk to you) but you know what I mean. Now every time the kids start going at each other over everything from who used the last bathroom cup (my daughter) to why someone’s (my son`s) underwear was sitting on the staircase, I can literally feel my brown hairs turn white. Thank God for hair dye!

Anyway, this was not the point, although I guess it could be since the following scenario which we now all lovingly refer to as "The Cheez-It Incident" should have turned all of my hair gray and then some. One of my children is a boy, a growing teenage boy who will eat anything you put in front of him even if you tell him its elephants testicles, and when he is done with that, he will eat whatever is in front of you. You would think this would be a great diet for me, since I never get to finish what is on my plate, yet mysteriously I still don`t look like Scarlett Johansson, go figure. 

My son would have been a great contestant on Fear Factor if that show was still around. Anyway, he tends to eat a lot, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week that kid has something in his mouth or is about to put something into his mouth every time you see him.

I can relate. I was married to his father who was a champion eater when I met him back when he was 19 years old. I remember one night after first dating him; he picked me up from work and took me to Roy Rogers to get some dinner before we went back to his house. Of course another digression, I believe I jusat dated myself big time by mentioning Roy Rogers, a fast-food restaurant that has been defunct for probably 15 years. 

Anyway, he asked me what I wanted when we got to the window and I said a burger, fries and a diet coke. He then proceeded to finish the order with the following, and no I am sad to say that I am not making this up or exaggerating for better effect, " 3 double R burgers, a 3 piece chicken with 2 biscuits, two large fries, a baked potato and some kind of dessert" I figured he was ordering some food for his parents or sister who I knew would be at his house when we got there.

I was wrong; I sat eating my burger as he chowed down the rest of that food in front of me. I was in awe and amazed that he not only ate it all but was able to still walk and talk after such a feast. I was convinced he would have a stroke. Needless to say I spent most of the next 17 years watching him eat like that, although once he hit his thirties he wasn’t able to do it as much without consequences. So, when my son hit 13, and 6 foot 1, all in the same day I wasn’t really worried about the eating me out of house and home phase, I had seen it before and from experience at that point, knew it was a common occurrence in teenage boys, or at least in the boys in his father`s family. 

My daughter on the other hand can’t stand it. When I have recited the above story about my second husband to her, she always wonders why I did not run out of the room screaming and never see him again. She seems to think he cornered the market on men and big appetites. I keep telling her she will be in for quite a shock when she gets married someday, and finds out they all do that to one extent or the other. 

That reminds me, I should tell her about the time we were at my cousins wedding and my husband went around to everyone's table asking if they were going to eat the fatty pieces they cut off their steaks. That story should really get her going. 

Anyway, she seems to think that I should put a door on the kitchen with a lock on it that will only let my son in at certain times for minutes at a time, giving him strict access to the kitchen and therefore the food. Her reasoning for this is that it isn’t fair that he eats all the food and then when she wants something that she saw me buy three weeks earlier and it isn’t there anymore waiting for her to finally be in the mood to eat it, she freaks out. And by freaks out I mean the following:

This time I was in my room probably reading or on the computer as that is really all I ever do (I know I have no life, we have established this already, you try having your own life living with these two). I was having what I am sure is a nice quiet evening when the silence was pierced with the sounds of my daughters screams. I tried to ignore it, listening of course to make sure no one was hurt, but ignoring it none-the-less. Now, ignoring my daughter screaming is not easy. At least three times a month neighbors call the cops thinking my daughter is being butchered to death or worse yet she is butchering us, because she has a scream that could probably register a 7.5 on the Richter scale, and goes through you like a knife.

But somehow I managed to ignore her until she truly was screaming so loud that only dogs could hear her. So I reluctantly got up and headed towards the kitchen just in time to watch my daughter throw a box of Cheez-Its at my sons head (who ducked with Jedi reflexes I might add) and watched as the box hit the ceiling fan, throwing little orange bits of Cheez-Its all over my kitchen (and we all know who ended up having to clean that up). Apparently she had wanted some of the Cheez-Its which I had bought at least a week before, and was only now in the mood for. When she got to them there were only a few left, thanks of course to my son whose idea of a bowl of cereal is to take one of my mixing bowls I use to bake a cake and filling it up with half the box and a half gallon of milk.

She was livid; you would have thought someone had shot her dog or something. She was breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling steadily with every breath and she glared at him with death daggers. My son for his part at least, was smart enough to know when to get out before blood is spilled and as he saw me enter the kitchen ran towards and behind me for cover. Coward.

Needless to say I solved this problem by....laughing. I know, not the reaction you expected but when you walk into your kitchen into the sight I saw, believe me you would have thought it funny as well. I promised my daughter that for now on I will buy her, her own box of Cheez-its that she can keep in her room, which still didn’t satisfy her. She wanted me to have my sons jaw wired shut and let him get his nourishment through a straw until he was at least as she said, "36"

Obviously I did not give in to her request and she stomped off telling me I should do something about "my son". Since that time she was taken to labeling food with her name and threats that read something like, "Touch this and I will make sure mom never has grandchildren" and nice things like that. For his part, my son is good and never touches the threat labeled food. When I told my parents this story I was given no sympathy as my father so kindly reminded me that when my then husband and I lived with them for a short period of time waiting for the closing on our house years ago, he had to take a second mortgage out on the house just so he could pay for my husband’s food.

So the moral of the story, well, I told my daughter that living with her brother will be good practice for her for when she is married, as overall men in general do have a tendency to eat a lot more than us. But she balked at this telling me that if her future husband dared do the things she has to put up with from her brother he won’t be her husband for long; my sympathies to my future son-in-law. When that didn’t work I did point out to her that compared to the times I find my son sitting on top of her on the floor farting on her head in retaliation for something she said or did to him, the food thing was way down on the list.

She responded with something that sounded an awful lot like," you should have stopped having sex after you had me." Ah...the joys of raising children. Hmmm...I think that distant sound I hear is my father laughing and thanking God that when it comes to raising children and then becoming a parent yourself, what comes around goes around. Damn, I feel another one of those urges coming on to call my parents and apologize profusely for ever being a teenager. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi…you`re my only hope.

Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you`re my only hope!

So where to begin? How does one start a blog, is it like writing a novel? Once upon a time and so forth, although now a days who starts novels with once upon a time? But either way, where does one begin when they plan on writing about their life for the world to read?

I think, I shall begin with a warning, kind of like when you buy a DVD and they post that threatening announcement that you can be arrested if you illegally copy said DVD. Does anyone ever actually get convicted of that offense I wonder, or is it kind of like the whole tag on the pillow thing, it scares the hell out of some people, but really there is no real threat behind it? Although I do know several people in their thirties who are still afraid to rip the tags off of their pillows, as if they think there is some secret squad out there that monitors pillow tags and will come into your house, breaking down your door to terrorize your family if you rip one of those off. Kind of like a Men in Black squad for rogue pillow offenders. But I digressed.

Actually, that's a great place to start. I tend to digress when I am writing, bouncing from one thought to another as if I am having a conversation with you, so consider yourself warned. Second place, this is a blog about my life, the life of those around me, observations of life, rants, raves, bitching, moaning, you know the usual. So please, if for some reason you tend to be easily offended, or don't like off color humor slipping in to your reading from time to time, then please, stop reading before you feel the need to rip me one in the comments section.

I am a proponent of free speech of all kinds, whether I agree with what is being said or not, and because of that I believe instead of asking or demanding your government get involved and censor or rate things, YOU, as an individual human with what I assume is a brain like everyone else's, should monitor what you do or do not watch. Don’t like Howard Stern, here’s a unique idea...are you ready....don’t listen to him! Wow, easy huh? Bet you never thought of that on your own before. Sorry in that warning above, I guess I should have mentioned I can tend to be sarcastic and a bit nasty towards human stupidity (mine included), consider this an amendment to the above warning.

Anyway, digressing again this is just my welcome blog. I hope to entertain you all with my somewhat strange, hopefully humorous, and always slightly a bit off from center stories. You can revel in the twisted hell that is my life and if it brightens your day to realize someone else is more fucked up than you, and someone else's life is closer to the fifth ring of hell than yours, then I was glad I could help, and my job is done.

The name of my blog should be easy for most to recognize, and if you don’t then you have been living in a log cabin in the woods for too long, and probably are not reading this anyway, because I doubt they have the Internet in log cabins. Although, oddly enough while I was going through a catalog of magazine choices recently, to order some subscriptions through my friends son’s school, my son and I got quite a laugh at some of the magazines being offered, one of them being Log Cabin Magazine.

For the life of me and my son, we could not figure out who reads this magazine, and how on earth they have enough readership numbers to keep publishing, but I guess as we all learn, there are all kinds of people out there, and I guess a lot of Log Cabin owners..who knew? So on the off chance that you are a relative of Abe Lincoln and living in a Log Cabin and reading this, welcome.

Anyway, back to my point, I named my blog Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi you’re my only hope, because sometimes I think he just may be. Between my own life experiences and those of the people I know and the crazy world we live in, which to me seems to get crazier by the day, I am sometimes lost for an answer or an explanation about the things that go on in our lives on a daily basis. Of course the fact that I am a big Star wars fan (yeah, yeah, call me a geek, mock me, giggle, whatever), and an atheist (although when people ask my religion, I usually say Jedi), I decided looking to Obi-Wan Kenobi for guidance couldn't hurt.

So, every time I see or hear something that makes me wonder how we ever evolved from the apes, for instance Octomom and her one woman baby factory, or disgruntled customers at McDonald`s calling 911 because they cannot get their McNugget fix, I tend to find myself saying, "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi you’re my only hope!"

Mom, kids, dogs and cats living together; Mass Hysteria.

I have a dog that marks the furniture if you leave him alone for two seconds, and by alone I mean you turned your back to pick something up off the floor, or god forbid need to use the bathroom. The same aforementioned dog can also get out of a locked cage, without busting through the bars while actually leaving the door closed and padlocked. As if aliens hovered over the house in their UFO, beamed him up for tests (which would explain a lot since I always thought he was a little off) and then beamed him back down, but their GPS got stuck and they beamed him back a little outside of the cage instead of in the cage. How he manages this I don't know, but it happened more than once, so either he is Houdini reincarnated, which seems a waste of Houdini’s talents if that is true, or I should worry that Steven Spielberg has been filming his new movie in my house when I am not home.

On a side note believe it or not while searching online for a new alien proof cage, I found a site that actually deals with what they call cages for “Houdini Dogs”, I swear I am not making that up, look it up yourself when you have a few minutes and nothing to do. It`s worth the laugh, and if anything it at least made me feel like I was not alone, then again I already felt that way when I thought aliens were beaming him out of his cage, just in a different more terrifying way.

Anyway, the same dog who by the way is black and weighs over 125 pounds, seems to think he may be invisible to humans. So, if you are in the room with him and get up to walk towards the backdoor, he will jump and bark at you in circles, sometimes jumping ahead of you onto a piece of furniture so that he can leap in front of you as you walk by, just to be sure you know he is there and would like to go out. Of course this method tends to not work for him when he knocks you over in midstride and you break some important bone you need in order to make it to the door, but he seems oblivious to this particular weakness in his plan.

Besides thinking he becomes invisible to the naked eye like he is wearing Harry Potter’s cloak, he also thinks that when humans sleep at night you somehow forget he exists by morning. This causes him to panic that he will never be walked or fed again. So, exactly one tenth of a second after my alarm goes off in the morning, and I know it is one tenth because I actually used a stop watch to time it once, and we will leave the fact that I obviously have too much time on my hands out of this for now, he begins to bark from his cage loudly and continuously. The cage by the way is now padlocked with my son’s industrial strength bike lock, which so far the aliens have not figured out, so as you can imagine that is a big relief.

Needless to say, I don’t even get a chance to pee. I have to run to his cage and let him out before he wakes everyone else up in the house. I then have to stand by the back door in my pajamas and do the pee-pee dance, hoping beyond hope he is quick this morning since I am a woman who has had two kids, and holding in pee is not an easy thing to do anymore, since some things aren’t as, how shall I put this nicely, elasticized as they used to be. Like a rubber band my ass, I haven’t sneezed without peeing on myself in 17 years. Remind me to find that gynecologist and smack the shit out of him.

Anyway, sorry I digressed. This same dog also thinks that any noise coming from my bedroom indicates that the night is over and it is time to bark for his morning pee. So, if my nose is stuffed, or I have a cold and I wake up in the middle of the night to cough or need some nose spray, which unfortunately happens often as I am hopelessly addicted to it, I have to slowly and quietly close my bedroom door, then grab a pillow and cover my face with it and as gently as possible cough and or squeeze my nose spray so he doesn’t hear me. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.  If it doesn’t, I am up now up at 3am, walking the dog to shut him up. Wish you were me yet? No, keep reading then.

I have a cat who uses his litter box to poop but sometimes can't seem to find it when he needs to pee,  but can apparently find counter tops, table tops, and spots on the kitchen floor without the help of bifocals. Both of the aforementioned animals above also have fleas that apparently have never read the side of the box of the Advantix, because they continue to have a party on my cat and dog, sometimes even laughing at us with party hats on their heads, as we put the medicine on.

I have an oil burner that was purchased around the time Lincoln was giving the Gettysburg address that no matter how many parts are replaced or fixed seems to go out just when you need to start using it again, but seems to work just fine in the summertime. This leads to weeks of cold showers for my son and I as I save the money to have it fixed yet again. You may have noticed I did not say cold showers for my daughter, because she doesn't take them, but instead opts to go to friend's homes or my parent's house to shower instead, cold showers and my princess do not mix.

I have a deck that has been slowly falling apart over the years, which as of today no longer has any railings around it at all, and a fence around my property that is falling apart in different places, some pickets from age, some from some violent storms we have had, and some I think are doing it just to taunt me.
I can only afford to pay my lawn guy twice a month instead of weekly, so now at night (because my son doesn't want the neighborhood watching him doing this, not that I can blame him), my son goes out there and using pruning shears to cut the tall grass before it starts to look like a scene from Little House on the Prairie.

I have no car. I share my daughter's car, and what an experience that is. When you allow your kid’s to use something of yours, they are all over it and take it over as if it is their own, and look at you cross eyed when you remind them that it is YOURS and they should treat it as such. But wow, when the shoe is on the other foot, and they have something that you need to borrow, suddenly it is all about making sure you know IT IS THEIR`s and they are only letting you use it out of the kindness of their hearts. You better not change the seat, mirrors or radio stations, even if that means, you have to lean down until your head is in your rib cage to check the side mirrors when changing lanes. (My daughter and I are 1 foot apart in height)

My son, who's DNA has been found to match that of Bigfoots, goes through his sneakers about every two months, what he does to tear through them so quickly I will never know, and honestly am afraid to find out. That in and of itself wouldn't be that bad, except for the fact that he is a size 15, which isn't sold at the cheapy stores like Payless. No, I have to order from Reebok or Nike themselves, which means $100.00 minimum per pair, four times a year. He is damn lucky the sex was worth it to make him; the marriage on the other hand is another story!

I have a first ex husband who thinks having a child means have sex and hope someone else does all the work and a second estranged husband who disappeared over 2 years ago, who in a haze of drug abuse, lost himself and destroyed us and our family in the process. He hasn’t worked in years, doesn't pay child support and thinks the world owes him something.

My washer and dryer were broken years ago by my aforementioned missing second husband, whose idea of trying to fix it at the time meant taking all the parts out and leaving them strewn across my basement floor. So I wash everything by hand in the bathtub. My vacuum broke a few weeks ago, and since my property taxes went up again I am stretched thin, so instead of buying one with money I don't have, I use industrial strength packing tape on my hands and knees to clean the carpet, thank god we have wood floors in most of the rooms.

Oh, did I mention my kitchen ceiling is now leaking and almost ready to come down in some spots? So the money I was slowly saving to put the front fence back in so my dog can run around in the backyard without getting out, although that seems pointless since he can manage to get out of a locked cage, will now have to pay to patch the ceiling instead.

On top of this my daughter needs $200 dollars in December to apply for graduation from her college. Now I know I quit High School and academically I am probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but am I the only one who is wondering why I have to pay to graduate college? Haven't I been doing that this whole time with tuition and books and extras? Hasn’t she been earning that by attending, studying and getting good grades? Now I have to pay $200.00 or all of that goes out the window and she doesn't graduate? WTF?

On top of the ridiculous pay to graduate fee that is due, it will be $200.00 for her yearbook, and another $400.00 for her senior picture package, something of course I can bitch to high heaven about in here, but we all know I will pay, because no one wants their kid to be the only one who didn't get what all the others got. Parent Peer pressure is a bitch. That is all on top of the $325.00 I paid last year for yet another class ring. I bought my son’s High School class ring this year at the low sale price of $425.00 (thank you to my husband for passing on his abnormally large size 13 finger genes, (although in another essay, I will explain why I never complained about that trait on him, but that’s a story for another time entirely....and for those using their imaginations, yes it is what you are thinking of!)

My son will also need his senior class photos, which we bought for my daughter when she was graduating High School, so of course he must have them to, those are $500.00 for the ultimate package with clothes changes, different backgrounds, and you can even bring in props. My son better be ready for me to hand him his trusty light saber, because if I’m paying $500.00, he is taking a graduation picture in his Jedi robes, light saber and all! Then of course there will be the Junior Prom this year, and after that I am sure they will find many other ways to suck every last penny out of my hand before it even gets into my hand. My paychecks are spent so quickly, I haven't touched my own money in so long I don't even remember what it looks like anymore.

Oh, wait, did I mention my daughter suffers from Lupus, Lupus Nephritis, Fibromyalgia, Anti-Phospholipid Antibody Syndrome, Raynaud`s, Vasculitis and Sjogren`s? Knew I forgot something. By the way want to have some fun with Microsoft Word spell check? Try putting those diseases in any article, they not only come up spelled wrong, but Microsoft doesn't even have some of them in their dictionary, guess I should tell my daughter they don’t exist! These lovely autoimmune diseases choose any inopportune moment to strike and cause my daughter scores of hospital visits, chemotherapy treatments and more. They can always be counted upon to throw a monkey wrench into our already interesting lives when we least expect it.

My second husband the disappearing magician, is off living with some woman who apparently doesn’t mind paying for him since he applied for welfare recently and had the nerve to take me to court and try to get spousal support from me. That was a joke and a colossal waste of tax payer money since he obviously didn’t get anything from me, I have nothing to give, and would quit before I handed over the few dollars I have. He doesn’t even pay child support and the court thought, " let's bring them in for a hearing anyway on whether the good law abiding citizen who works two jobs and struggles alone to take care of two kids, should give the law breaker, the 15 times arrested drug addict, who is on 3 years probation, who left his family with all the bills and pays no support a chance to tell us why she should pay him some money". WTF is all I have to say to that one.

So what was my reason for this post you ask? No, it wasn’t to depress you all, at least I think it wasn't. Hopefully, it was to make you close your computer screen, after reading it of course and say to yourself, "shit at least I don’t have it that bad." Glad I could be of service.

I have done my part to uplift the community around me, so now I’m off to take  cold shower, go to bed in a blanket I washed by hand and get up at the crack of dawn to go to work in clothes I have had for over three years. Have a good night! You know for some fun on my part perhaps I will put this whole post as an ad in the personals on craigslist, I would love to see the responses I will get.  I’ll be sure to post them as they come in! After all, I might as well get a good laugh at my own expense, what else do I have left? Besides it’s free, which is good, since that is about all I could afford! It is amazing I haven't committed myself by now, although honestly the only reason I haven't is because I don't think they would let me bring my life-size Han Solo in Carbonite cardboard cutout with me, and what point is there of living without that?