Which Friend Are You In Your Group? (G-uno)

My daughter, and I agree that when referring to our female circle of friends “Steel Magnolias” is by far the most accurate way to classify the girls. The combination of friendships in that movie pretty much covers the majority of personalities found in our female circle of friends. I’m betting there are a lot of other women out there smiling, and nodding as you read this post. I’m gonna have to ask Jay from the fantastic blog “Assholes Watching Movies,” what the male counter movie would be for the men.

Let’s clarify the personality types for the one possible single female out there who has missed the ultimate girl movie of all times.

1. M’Lynn Eaton- Who is played by Sally Field. She is the strong silent type in her group. She is the one with the great relationship, supermom, and the one everyone comes to for advice. The proverbial rock in the group. She’s the listener, the friend who gets to hear everyone’s deepest darkest secrets because everyone knows she will take your secret to the grave.
2. Shelby Eaton- Who is played by Julia Roberts. She is the carefree, live in the moment type, and I quote “I would rather have thirty minutes of something wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.” She’s warm-hearted, and the one you go to when you need to borrow some courage to live your life wide open.
3. Truvy Jones- Who is played by Dolly Parton. She is the romantic sweetheart of the group. Slightly insecure, and highly curious/gossipy in a fun-loving way.
4. Clairee Belcher- Who is played by Olympia Dukakis. She is the funny one of the group. She can can bring your group from tears to laughter in the blink of an eye. An astute observer of human nature with twist of sarcasm. The one most likely to “poke the bear” to amuse herself.
5. Annelle Dupry- Who is played by Daryl Hannah. She’s the more reserved one in the group.Happy to be out of the spot light. She’s always searching for her place in life, never really feeling completely comfortable in her own skin. Loyal & supportive.
6. Ouiser Boudreaux- Who is played by Shirley MacLaine. She is the character of the group. Outspoken, glass half empty type. She uses a shield of negativity as protective armor, in an attempt to hide her soft little underbelly. The disgruntled meanie with a heart of gold.

Just as in every circle of friends each personality brings something unique to the group. A kind of balance that makes life sweeter! I would have to rate my daughter as the combination of predominately #4, with a strong side order of 2 & 6. As for myself (Always harder to see yourself 😉 ) I think I’m a #1, #4, and a #6. Which friend are you?

The Thing About Daughters… (G-uno)

She was the first in every way, from the moment they laid her warm 8 pound 6 ounce body onto my chest. Heart to heart, my world would never be the same. She didn’t even cry. She held up her little head looking around the room as if she were surveying it’s worth. The doctor, and everyone else in the room shared the same look of awe at her incredible strength. I am to this day amazed that she only scored a 9 instead of a 10 on her APGAR rating, because she did not enter the world screaming like a banshee. If I think about it, she entered the world pretty much the same way she enters a room now. She silently walks in with her head held high, and her beautiful chocolate-colored eyes surveying everything around her.

She is petite in stature, but large in her presence. Her “Helen of Troy” beauty lures you in, but her total command of the room makes you want to stay. She’s engaging, smart, direct, and her sense of humor is fueled by her unyielding desire to see your ability to withstand her way of magnifying your most hidden human characteristics. She can be extremely driven, and has very little tolerance for those who disregard her need for personal space, for uncleanliness, and disorder. She has zero tolerance for disloyalty, and I think this stems from the fact that she is quite possibly one of the most loyal people on the planet.

She sees the world from a more grown up point of view than I do. Even though she is to grown now to lay across my heart she is forever entwined in it’s every beat. We can talk for hours about everything, and nothing at all. I can count on her to tell me the truth when none else can. She sees me in a way that no one else can see me. Her very existence makes my life better. That’s the thing about daughters… 😉

earliest childhood fears (g2)

G-uno, I’m going to lure you into posting one on this one as well. I don’t know why this is what is sticking in my mind for some reason, so I’m going with it to purge it from my system.

---

I am an only child, I spent a great deal of time by myself and I had/have a very vivid imagination.

The earliest fear I can remember… windows.

Most especially the windows in my own room and playroom. They were low, on the same side of the house and the curtains were always pulled back which means when the light was turned on in either room, especially at night, the windows displayed only a black abyss, but anything in the room would have come into brilliant focus to anything standing outside of it looking in through those windows. I’ve always been a night owl as far back as I can remember and I just hated the feeling I got of constantly being watched when in either of these rooms.

It wasn’t the dark I feared, it was something being able to get close to me, to watch me, and I would never know it. For some reason, even the box bay window at the back of the house never bothered me like the ones on that one side did. Perhaps because it had curtains in the lower half of it…

I felt most comfortable in the back of Grand’s walk-in closet, my closet, under the bed, the crevice between the wall and the piano where Grand kept their violin and viola, behind the couch, in the bushes in the middle of the night, a crevice of the woodpile and the like. I even have a distinct, though blurred, memory of trying to silence those damn bells parents would put on children’s shoes to pinpoint their location. I didn’t want to be found until I was ready. If you’ve ever seen Silence of the Lambs, that moment when the bad guy is just about to touch her hair in the dark because he could see her but she couldn’t see him… that resonated with me more than anything else in that film.

I’ve come to realize that I have never really shaken it either. I refused to ever sleep in either of those rooms. Until I moved out, I slept on the couch or bunked with Grand in my younger days. My favorite spot, the couch, was in the center of the house almost completely surrounded by walls and in a corner.

Even living on my own, I usually picked the room with little to no windows. When my mom died and I moved into her house, I slept in the basement (this was a four bedroom house, mind you), on a mattress and box springs tossed directly under the one window it had because this was the only place where you couldn’t be seen if looking in through the window and I had not yet figured a good way to cover it.

Even now, My room lets in no light and I call it my bear cave. My curtains are plastic backed and always closed. I’m more likely to use a thin rug to cover a window than to leave it open and put the rug on the floor. The only exception being one tiny window over the kitchen sink… but it still is mostly covered. Houses with lots of huge windows freak me out. I don’t really fear it anymore, but I get anxious and feel exposed with open or uncovered windows.

On a subconscious level I suppose this might be why I’ve become very sensitive to sunlight, my night driving is better than my day, I don’t turn a lot of lights on in my house and I can usually get my eyes adjusted outside pretty quickly. The funny thing is I don’t really have a particular problem with general voyeurism, I love to just people watch sometimes too. I think its just when its a strategic advantage that it bugs me. So far it’s only come in handy when someone is at my door I don’t want to talk to. They can’t see I’m on the other side giving them the finger.

Sidenote: when I was still in elementary school and I would sneak to the back of the house to watch Mtv like I wasn’t supposed to, the door leading to the attic would rattle from how to Grand would set up the fans in the house to cycle air through the house to keep the temperature down. It rattled bad enough it sounded like something(s) trying to get out. Instead of logic kicking in, my imagination told me it was a pack of angry leprechauns with metal fingernails that would claw the shit out of me when they got out and it sounded loud like that because could smell me nearby. Didn’t take long before I would race back to bed and hide.

for www.baffledbaboon.com: embarrassing/funny moments (g2)

To get up to pace with my Social Experiment:

BAFFLEDBABOON SAYS: Well, I think It would be really fun to hear about one of the funniest or most awkward moments of your life.

Let me tell you first that I was quite eager to see what verbal diarrhea you guys would launch my way and I was sincerely hoping my dream of writing a composition utilizing the phrase “deprivation suit” might finally be in my grasp. *sigh* And now that I’ve told you that, if anyone suggests it now, it will seem forced and inorganic and I will have lost interest.

Now, here’s a nugget of information about me: it is very, very difficult to embarrass me. As I’m typing this I’m still trying to figure out if there is a real embarrassing memory I have to access. Traumatic, sure. Funny, got a shit ton of those, so that may end up being my fallback, but embarrassing… I’m having an impossible time spelling it even though the spelling makes me think of “bare ass”, let alone feeling it. Right now, I just spelled it three different ways, every fucking one of them wrong and if it weren’t for spell check, you would have seen that. That would have been emba…. awful.

---

Even though I say we had gone out drinking beforehand in those prior times of deviancy, I was dead sober when I was singing at the top of my lungs at that Denny’s with the waiter and my cohorts. As far as I know, I cannot sing. I’ve had a compliment here and there, but my own kid would make me stop when I tried to sing them to sleep.

---

Speaking of bare ass, I lost a game of strip poker and had to rub my ass with vaseline and imprint it on a mirror that one of the players hung in their den. Last I heard, my ass was still immortalized there. Peeling my pants off later was interesting too. There is just no way to completely remove vaseline… from…. crevices.

---

On a typical day when mom would drag my ass out shopping (hate shopping), I decided I was going to have a raging tantrum because she refused to buy me some dinosaur band-aids. She finally relented.

I also discovered an entire end cap of electronic versions of the mole from Caddyshack that danced and played Kenny Loggins when you hit the button. I proceeded to hit all the buttons and dance along to “I’m all right”. When my mom discovered me, she passed by as though she had no clue who I was and was equally disturbed by this strange person.

It’s says “Try Me” right there!

I was twenty-six years old.

I think I still have a couple of those band-aids.

---

When I was selling off my mom’s stuff and trying to pack up to move, I had a friend who was co-running the final yard sale with me at my house. Basically, I did the manual labor, he utilized his charisma to sell. I hate shopping, therefore I hate selling too. The piano was one of the last big items she had and I wanted to make sure it went to the right family. The newlywed and mom who made an offer were offering lower than I wanted to settle for, so my charmer was working his magic and they had been playing and singing to it for over an hour.

The music suddenly stopped and both the girl and her mom came out purple, choking, trying to laugh while covering the lower half of their faces. Then my stupid buddy comes out slowly, leaving the front door wide open with a shit-eating grin on his face and he just says “um…. sorry.”

Apparently, over the three days we had been selling, he had had copious amount of fast food and alcohol and landed an SBD that likely melted some of the paint off the inside of the house… or cauterized it on. I couldn’t enter the house for an hour. I think I refused to feed him anything but salad until he left.

---

I suppose I had about 90% annoyance and 10% embarrassment when right after I divorced, my roommate had gone shopping for me so I had some decent managerial-like clothing to wear for my recent promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, I was well aware I looked like a homeless reject, but as a married person, I really did nothing for myself, ever. Now that I was separated, I needed to revive a lot of that self-awareness long lost. I had given my roommate the money to shop for me since they offered and I knew they had good sense on that kind of stuff.

Most of my clothing was way too big because “ala Hefty” was much easier to select quickly and I’d rather rip out my own eyeballs before I will try anything on.

We had a corporate visit the next day, another friend wanted to get their hands on my head and I was rather freaked out by what met me in the mirror afterwards.

I managed to forget about it after a bit that next morning, especially since I’m the type who usually ignores mirrors… until I walked out on the main floor.

and got a standing ovation…

and some cat calls…

hoots…

remarks about looking like proper folk, etc.

I stopped in my tracks, then slowly did a 180 and went back the way I came.

I tried to spend the rest of the day in a back office working on paperwork, but was quickly run out by my asshole boss who found all of this entirely too entertaining to let pass. I told him I hoped his girlfriend called him horny and he got hit by a dump truck before he ever got to her.

---

BB, I hope I didn’t disappoint! And by the way, where the hell have you been all my life, your site is epic!

Little Man’s Mom (G-uno)

I heard his tiny footsteps coming down the stairs he knows today will be a different kind of day because his Mom is having surgery. He is happy to see me sitting on the couch, but immediately blurts out “My Mom is at the hospital.” I shake my head in agreement, and I tell him that Mom is going to miss him every second! “Big Brother,” and “The Baby” (otherwise known as the king) were still sleeping. I don’t tell him that everything will be okay because I try to be very careful with my words when I speak to “Little Man.” He is 8 years old, and his super power is Autism. He is very adamant about holding you accountable for your exact wording, so I have learned to choose my words carefully.

Mom is the heart of her family. I love the way she takes care of boys! She is the only female in her house with the exception of one of her dogs. Mom works a full-time job in addition to being a wife, and a special needs mother. All three of her sons attend different schools, and each one is completely different from the other. Her super power is her ability to meet everyone’s needs in a loving, and structured way. Mom has made it a priority to have a unique, and special bond with each of her boys. I am in complete awe of her stamina. I arrived at their home at 5 a.m. this morning she greeted me with a hug, and her always warm smile. I could see the fear in her eyes. Her fear is not because of her impending surgery, it is the fear of a loving mother worrying if her boys will be okay. Her surgery is of a serious nature. I personally wished that it could have been put off one more day. I have a great dislike of the month of February,so one more day would have put us into March. I know this is irrational, but still the thought lingers in my mind.

“Little Man” and I decide we should wake his brothers for breakfast together. He gets some satisfaction from the idea of waking them up in his own little unique way. He bombards each brother by pouring a bucket full of his beloved beanie babies onto their heads. All the while laughing so hard he can hardly catch his breath. “Big Brother” and “The Baby” do not find this to be funny at all. Usually “Big Brother” would react to this in a much more physical way, but today he is worried about Mom. He asks me if Mom is already in surgery. I tell him I’m not exactly sure, but I know that she is thinking of him too.

Next the boys and I go downstairs to the kitchen. Mom has set the table for each boy with a paper plate. She has written a note on each plate with a red marker. ” I Love You! Mommy.” Beneath each message she had drawn several red hearts. I couldn’t help thinking how fitting to receive little plates filled with hearts from the Mom who is the heart of this family. 😉

conversations with spawn (g2)

Today is President’s day and like all other obscure fucking holidays, school is out for the day. As a test of self-management and responsibility, I left spawn at home with a list of things to accomplish before I get home. I’m testing the waters.

That said, I realize that trying to explain our conversations to outsiders is cumbersome at best, no one gets it and we really are all over the place but they tend to get damn funny. It is rare that I get a chance to document them in writing so others have a better understanding of how we interact. SO, I am pasting in part of our chat log that has been going on as they have been “cleaning” the house today. If it gets better, I may post more.

spawn: Are ye getting worried? 

me: nah. only that I will come home to the same mess

spawn: Ahole. …i didn’t cuss, I spelled ‘a hole’.

me: i’ll show you a hole 

spawn: Same here 

me: 

spawn: Its not a hole. Hah. 

me: came from one

spawn: I don’t want a sibling.

me: you think of siblings when you see turds?

spawn: They look exactly like one when the’re born.

me: nah more like toothless screaming molerats 

spawn: That too.

me: nothing alike, though if the drugs are too good, you poop too

spawn: Now stop distracting me, gotta get to cleaning or else the devil might kill meh.

me: you’ve been in the south too long

spawn: You’ve been weird to long. Now hush. Ill mess around with your desk and place things in better spots. I miss you so much that apparently I mistake the dryer for your occasional sniffling.

me: just leave my porn collection where I left it.

confessions of a bad parent: sex talks (g2)

My explanations of things posed by my kid tend to get long-winded if left unchecked (ha! like you guys haven’t already figured that out!) so I have to really give serious thought on how to condense things when posed questions. One of which was the mechanics of sex.

By age six, my kid understood that “sex” could happen between both hetero as well as gay/lesbian couples, but it was an abstract concept. So with about 5 minutes before we have to walk out the door to start our day, my kid questions me about the mechanics.

I pause to figure out how I can possibly break this down in simple terms, I look around… ah.

me:”Ok, let’s start with the basic boy-girl concept, ok? You know how you can hammer a nail in the wall?”

spawn:”yeeeeaaah?”

me:”Boys are the nail, girls are the hole in the wall.”

spawn has a look of sheer horror at this point.

me:”um, but its ok, its not like the boy has to put the hole there, its already…. you know,…. there…..”

spawn:…

me:”just get in the car.”