A Little Play In Three Acts

Scene I - Friday morning, our bedroom, around 6 am. I’m sound asleep. E is supposed to be getting ready for work. The three dogs are trying to snooze with me and the cat is milling about.

E: Babe, wake up.
Me: Uh? Wha?
E: Have you seen the plunger?
Me: Uh? Wha? No. Bathroom?
E: No. I’ve checked both bathrooms and I can’t find it. The toilet is stopped up and I really need it.
Me: I don’t know.
E: You sure?
Me: No.


Scene II – Our bedroom, an undetermined amount of minutes later. The dogs and I are back in our sound sleep.

E: Babe, wake up.
Me: Uh? Wha?
E: I fixed the toilet.
Me: Uh? Wha? Oh, good.
E: But I never found the plunger. We’ll probably have to go by Wal Mart and get a new one because the plunger is lost.
Me: Uh? K.


Scene III – Our bedroom at about 6:45 am. I’m awake now and remembering the previous conversations. E has gone to work. None of this conversation is spoken aloud but rather all happens in my head or maybe it was spoken aloud to the dogs because they are good listeners.

Me: How the hell do you lose a plunger???
I mean, how many places in a house do you have use for a plunger anyway?
He had it last. I don’t do plunger related things if I can get away with it.
Did he take it outside? What would need to be plunged outside? The pool?
Why would you plunge a pool? How would you plunge a pool?
Oh man, you know how he misplaces stuff sometimes. Is it in the freezer?
I cannot even make myself look there for a plunger.
Oh, and how did he fix the toilet without it?
Ewwww! I don’t really want to know that.
Well, since I’ve inherited a good bit of my mother’s neuroses, I might as well get started looking for it because I know I won’t leave the house until I find it this morning.
Crap.

This little play ends with me walking into our bathroom, where the cat loves to walk around and around the toilet (don’t ask because he’s 16 years old and I have no idea why and he won’t tell me). Turns out the cat had pushed the plunger back so that it was all the way behind the toilet where it couldn’t be seen unless you actually bent your head a bit more than usual to look for it. Man, I hope when it’s time, that’s not where the cat chooses to die. We’ll never find him.

Time it took to find it – approximately 15 seconds. Method of finding it – craning my neck a little farther than normal. Being able to blog about it – priceless.

I'm not snarky today...the meds must be working

E and I seem to be going through a bit of a good karma phase right now. Nothing spectacular but life is rolling along pretty well. He's enjoying his new job and training is going well. He's managed to win several objects with the company logo on them. I can't wait for him to win more stuff so we can furnish the whole house in things that boldly say, "Cox", because, as you all know, free stuff is fun.

I decided today, pretty much out of the blue, that it's time for me to tone down my language a bit. You see, as a forty-hrmhrm year old with no children, I've apparently missed an integral part of my development - the part where you have to learn to quit cussing because you have kids around all the time. As I've mentioned before, E and I tend to live like two college students because we don't have that responsibility. The dogs are pretty comfortable with our living arrangements and don't hear cuss words anyway. All they hear is, "Blah, blah, blah, treats." "Blah, blah, out, blah, blah, Nate!" "Blah, blah, Sophie, ball." "Blah, night-night, Sneauball, blah." You get the point. Even the cat has a limited vocabulary. I'm not worried that someday my mother's going to walk in and hear Omar scream, "Shit! The fucking dog's been eating crap out of my litter box again." But be that as it may, I've come to realize that at my age, most people I know don't use the flowery language that I tend to.

It's truly not my fault that I cuss as much as I do, really. I was an innocent 19-year-old when I went to work for the Sheriff's Office. Spend a few 12 hour shifts in the company of cops and see if you don't walk away with a whole new vocabulary. I had the pleasure of 17 years of it. Habits that old are very hard to break.

So wish me good luck as I embark on my quest to clean up my act. I may not be able to banish every curse word from my daily conversations but I'm going to give it a good try. I definitely don't want to turn into one of those people who say lame things like "feck!" or "sunny beaches!" or "drats!" Bleh! Those words make me shudder just to type them. In fact, if you hear me say one of those you have my permission to smack me.

I'm off to catch up on all your blogs. Later!

Where does funny cross the line?

There’s a “joke” floating around inboxes everywhere. I’m sure most of you have seen it by now. It’s the one about solving the illegal immigration problem, the New Orleans levee problem, and the Florida alligator overpopulation problem in one fell swoop by digging a moat along the boarder, using the dirt to raise the levees, and filling the moat with the alligators. Oh ha, ha.

You see, I don’t find a bit of humor in this.

First of all, whoever came up with this apparently isn’t too familiar with the Mexican border because there’s already a huge “moat” called the Rio Grande River. Second, I just see this “joke” as veiled hate.

Of course, I also see the whole immigration hoopla as veiled hate as well. You don’t see the Chimp-in-Chief screaming about building a fence along the Canadian border, do you? Of course not because it’s white people who live up there, not brown ones. And, well, the Canadians aren’t exactly flocking here, are they?

Someone posted this “joke” on a board I frequent and a friend of mine and I objected to it. When we expressed our beliefs that this was just veiled hate we were met with ridiculous comments like “well then are blonde jokes hatred toward blondes?” and “most jokes make fun at some sort of group, wouldn’t that make most jokes veiled hatred?” I chose to bow out gracefully and not respond further to this rather than getting in a pissing contest with someone over it. But I’ve got to tell y’all that I cannot believe how little we have progressed as a society when we still find these sorts of things humorous.

I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to let someone tell an offensive “joke” in front of me without my calling him/her on it. I’ve stuck to that decision. I can appreciate a good joke along with the next person. But make a joke in front of me that has to do with the color of a person’s skin or their sexual orientation or anything else that is just veiled racism or hatred and I’ll call you on it. That’s just me.

I’m feeling the need for a good break from that board. It’ll be the first break for me in four years. Sometimes the crap just gets to be enough. Maybe I’m just too sensitive about all this immigration stuff. I come from a line of immigrants who have nearly lost their language because it was beaten out of them two generations ago. Cajun French was my grandparents’ first language but teachers and other school personnel were allowed to administrator beatings if they caught them speaking anything but English on school campuses. So my parents’ generation wasn’t taught French. Because my grandparents spoke it at home, my parents learned to understand it but can’t speak it. It was never taught to us or spoken in front of us except when our grandparents wanted to say something about us or something that was not for our ears. It is a language near death and a huge tragedy. Maybe that’s why my heart feels so connected to these immigrants.

*sigh* Maybe I'm just ready for the weekend. Y'all have a great one.