Saw my friend's mother yesterday.

I had dinner with my friend's mother yesterday. We went out and got margaritas and some quesadillas at the local Mexican restaurant, and talked a lot about meditation and creative visualization. She encouraged me to write "Perfect health is the natural state of my being" and put it on my bathroom mirror so I would see it a lot. She used to be a court reporter and keeps a bundle of sayings like that in shorthand tucked into the plastic wrap of her current pack of cigarettes she has so if she's out having a smoke she can leaf through them and read them, though once she told me she was embarrassed since she had her cigarette pack out on the table when she was having dinner with a friend and a friend of her friend's, and the friend of her friend's, it turns out, knew shorthand and started reading out loud what she had tucked into her cigarette pack, and she got really embarrassed, though she didn't tell me what it was that got read out loud.

She was saying, too, at this one New Age store store she went to this year they had stickers saying "WEALTH" and "HEALTH" and stuff like that so you could slap them on whatever you were drinking and drink in health and wealth always so those things came to you through the power of positive thinking. I said I wasn't sure if that would work, but I sure as heck wouldn't have a cup in my house that said "DEATH" and always drink water out of it. She agreed.

She then told me that one of the worst things she ever saw in her life was at this New Age bible study she used to host, where a member told everyone that she was going through a lot that week because she had just found out that her cancer had come back, and you could tell, my friend's mom said, that everyone was thinking that it came back because this woman hadn't thought positively enough, and so she went up to comfort her afterwards since no one else had at all during the session. Too much of that positive thinking stuff is all about getting, she was saying, and there's nothing in it beyond that.

A couple months ago, too, she went to a Reikki-and-meditation retreat, and when she laid down on a bed with this one Reikki symbol, she got an intense headache and it didn't go away until she got up. She said it wasn't evil spirits, though, since she doesn't believe in them, but it was just her energy and the symbol's energy not jibing. She told me that a little part of her still believes in evil spirits from being raised Catholic, but if she had to steel herself to go into a Voodoo temple, she wouldn't cross herself or do anything like that, but rather imagine herself in a ball of light and tell herself she was protected before entering. She did admit, though, that finding a Voodoo doll under your bed with a pin stuck in it could probably kill you, if you thought it would.

"But," and here she got serious, "What always bothered me, is what about the dolls no one sees?"

Memories of California.

When I first got off the plane in San Diego a month or two ago, everyone I was seeing was tanned no matter how old they were, only everyone's skin was just a little more wrinkled than it should have been at their age. One tanned guy in his 40s was even reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", and I was like, "Shit, I haven't seen that in years."

When I got to my friends' hotel room -- I had gotten a hotel room with some people for the next three nights, but then when I ended up buying my ticket I was forced to come in a day earlier and so was left without a room until some people I leaned on said they'd let me sleep on their floor in this boutique-y hotel they were staying in downtown -- I took them to the bar to buy them drinks as a thank-you, even though it was ten at night and we were jet-lagged and none of us felt like drinking that much, though we all had excited energy because of the conference coming up that was starting the next day.

Going down through the lobby, there was this late 20s couple standing up at the main desk, a white guy with gelled-up spiked hair and a collared shirt with the collar turned up, and this really tan blonde girl with stark straight mega-dyed blonde hair going to her waste, and in a black cocktail dress and these incredibly high heels, and the guy was just standing there casually with a big hunk of her ass in his hand for like all of five minutes while he was talking with the woman at the front desk. "Come on, is she staying here?", he was like, and while the woman kept telling him that they couldn't release info one way or another on guests, he was like, "But we just saw her downtown a couple hours ago, she must be staying somewhere, come on, is Kelly Clarkson staying here?" The girl the guy was with didn't do anything, really, but just stand there and provide ass for the guy to reflexively hold.

At the bar, the bartender was a dick, and turned to talk to this other bartender he was talking shop with, this guy with his back to us who was in hiply-torn jeans and a white collared shirt (with the collar turned up!) and a big poof of brown hair like he was PacSun model. We sat down at a couch behind all this, and when the other bartender our bartender was talking with got up to leave, it turned out that he was 40-something, only you couldn't tell it from the back since he was dressing like he was 18.

California was fascinating.

Puerto Rico.

Miss Puerto Rico Universe's gown tested positive for pepper spray! To be honest, though, I'm amazed that a fellow Puerto Rican had enough wits and enough initiative to think this one through and pull it off.

Today I was eating at a hamburger place and they had "REAL HAMBURGER" decalled in their main windows, and I was thinking to myself, "No no no, 'HAMBURGER REAL'!" Kudos on the bilingualism, though.

One Easy Way to Fuck Up Your Children...

The "Elf on the Shelf"!:

This charming tradition began for our family when my children were very small. Plagued by their desire to know how Santa really knew who had been naughty or nice, I searched through the Christmas decorations for a plausible explanation. Nestled among them was the answer; a small elf doll from my own childhood. With that discovery, the idea for the elf tradition was born.

At our home the elf would arrive around the holidays, usually at Thanksgiving. His sole responsibility was to watch my children's behavior and report it to "Santa" each night. The next morning after the children awoke, they discovered the elf had returned from the "North Pole" (with some parental assistance) and was hiding in a different place. My children would race each other out of bed to try and be the first to spy him in his new position.

Over the years the tradition was perfected and rules were even introduced. For example, to better preserve his mystique the children were not allowed to touch him; however, they were allowed to talk to him. For obvious reasons, he was not allowed to reply. Eventually, my children even gave him a name - officially adopting him into the family.

Unwittingly, the tradition provided an added benefit: it helped the children to better control themselves. All it took was a gentle reminder that the "elf was watching" for errant behavior to be modified...

I saw one of these at a Hallmark today. What a fucked up tradition. It's like Chuckie meets George Orwell.

Blurting.

My mom was saying that this one lady at her work who has a couple kids in college was talking a couple months ago to her and another lady about her dog and how sick it had been and how she and her husband were going to get surgery for it but it was going to be $1500, and my mom said she was shocked, and before she knew what she was saying, she was like, "Euthanize it."

The lady was kind of shocked herself, and was like, "He's a member of the family."

My mom shrugged, then, I guess, and was like, "Yeah, but fifteen hundred dollars is a lot of money."

The lady then kind of huffed and was like, "Well, you don't have a dog, so you don't understand."

"No," my mom was like, "But it's still a lot of money."

My mom still says that was an appropriate response, and she says the dog didn't even last half a year after the surgery. She was like, "The dog was going to croak, so why not croak it sooner?"

Rabbit.

When my brother was eleven years old, he got a rabbit, and when he wrote to the state 4-H office to see if they had any information about rabbits, they sent him a bunch of recipes.

Christmas pageant.

Yesterday I went to my friend's little nephew's Christmas pageant at his daycare along with his grandma and his sister. The procession in was chaotic; all the kids held battery-operated candles, but would bolt from line to go hug their parents, or stop and wave to them and hold up everyone behind them. For one song they sang the daycare workers stuck floppy fabric antlers and flashing red noses on them; for another, "The Twelve Days of Daycare," they came in one by one and held up signs with something for each day of daycare (one cubbyhole, two snacks, etc.), and my friend's little nephew held up his sign, "seven superheroes", but he turned it around and was looking at the picture of the superheroes for the rest of the song and so no one in the audience really saw the sign. For the manger scene that close out the pageant, they dressed my friend's little nephew up as a shepherd with a brown robe and a brown piece of cloth tied around his head and a shepherd crook, and three little blonde girls were dressed as sheep in these costumes with cotton balls fluffed out around them. After they processed in and someone was reading a version of the nativity story, my friend's little nephew, who's like three or four, started turning to the little girls, stamping his crook on the ground, and being like, "Say 'BAA!'", or, "Lie down!", with the girls standing around and one or two of them occasionally saying "Baa."

After the pageant, there was cookies and punch in the daycare kitchen -- sugar cookies with green frosting and sprinkles or brown frosting and embedded M&Ms; the punch was something red, with rainbow sherbet tossed in to make it fizz -- and this one girl who worked at the daycare whose husband used to work with my brother and whose younger brother graduated with me from high school, only from the public school in town, showed me some Christmas pictures of her sons that she had taken that day, and started telling me about how her brother who I know is now a paramedic for some private ambulance company in Detroit. I guess a lot of times when they bring people out on stretchers people go alongside and try to get in the pockets to see if they have drugs with them, and just yesterday when they were putting a guy with a gunshot wound in the throat in the ambulance, a guy walked up to the stretcher with a pistol and finished the job right there, and the paramedics just stepped aside since they're not allowed to carry.

They also had bowls of chocolates out in the kitchen, too.

Books / Blacks / Styles / Marriage.

Today my mom was telling me how this one coworker of my mom's at the library where she works at is a techie, and how often a local priest comes in to consult him on techie stuff and they end up sitting at his desk and talking about that, so my mom's been planting books people have donated on his desk in case the priest comes by, weird shit like "How to Hit on Your Boss" and "How Not to Be an Asshole". She's been putting them in a drawer the priest is likely to open, so maybe he'll open them and see them right on top.

Today I was looking at the supermarket at an advertising poster for "High School Musical 2":

It definitely always seem like light-skinned blacks are the marketable ones, it seems.

Today I was at a local coffee shop and a gaggle of kids were there since school was out. You could see the style lag from urban to rural areas, especially with the guys; one even had a faux-hawk.

Today I called up a friend from home who's now living downstate to find out how to spell her little niece's name since I'm going to her Christmas Pageant tonight and I was making her a card, and my friend was like, "Oh, by the way, I don't know if you heard this, but I got married."

"Fuck," I was like, "When?"

"[My name]," she was like, "You're supposed to say 'Congratulations.'"

Supermarket samples.

Back in the city the yuppie supermarkets have water crackers with imported brie. At the supermarket just now in the town south of where my parents live, the supermarket sampler had ham and sliced-up block colbyjack on cheez-its. There also was another sampler with a few tostitos and a ready-made avocado-refried bean-sour cream-cheddar cheese taco dip.

Talking about fat people.

This past weekend me and my parents went to a Christmas concert put on by the local chamber orchestra and its youth counterpart, with an a-cappella interlude by a group of women all in black with snow flake wraps around their shoulders. My mom was like, "Look at the conductor, she has hers cut longer in back so it covers her ass." I was like, "No!", and my mom was like, "What, she's a smart woman, I would do that too if I had stand and show my ass to the audience for a half hour."

Later, when the orchestra came on stage, one of the violins was this absolutely gigantic woman who was incredibly round and was wearing black pants and a white blouse, so I nudged my mom and was like, "Look she came dressed as a snowball." My mom laughed so hard she cried, and when she finally stopped she told me that she had just been thinking the same thing.

A little after that, my dad asked about why did one violin walk on and play a note and then everyone played after her, and I was like, "Everyone tunes to her, she's the first chair," and my dad was like, "No," and then was like -- and remember, this violin was also pretty fat, though not as fat as Snowball -- "She's at least the first two chairs."

Talking about shit.

I find it really interesting that my circle of friends from high school, all of whom have gone on to get at least a master's degree, are fascinated by their shit.

For example, last Christmas when me and my friend who is doing environmental urban design got together for margaritas, the first ten minutes of our conversation was shit jokes, about our personal shit.

For another example, when I went to belly-dancing lessons this past Friday in Kalamazoo, my one friend from high school took me to her friend's house for pizza beforehand, and she went in to the bathroom to shit and when she came out, she was like, "Don't go in there, that shit was stinky," and since I misheard her, I was was like, "Come on, do we really have to know that your shit is sticky? What have you been eating anyways?" She then was like, "I said 'stinky', but it was that, too. I kept wiping and wiping and it wouldn't be done. It was like I had a brown crayon sticking out of my ass and I kept just wiping the tip of it off with the toilet paper."

She also told me later about how a couple weeks ago when she got mild diarrhea (sp.?) after a night of micro-brewery drinking, she took like four or five shits in the morning, and never turned around to look at the toilet, since she never does since she's a woman and has to squat to piss. When her husband came home, he came out to the living room mildly storming (he's a very calm person) and was like, "Why the fuck does our toilet look like a Denny's restroom?" When my friend went back in to look, she saw that she had sprayed watery shit halfway back up above the waterline of the toilet, only she had done that like three hours ago and it was all dried now. She said she went in and doubled up toilet paper and tried to pick it off through the toilet paper with her fingernails, which she said was the nastiest shit ever.

On another note, when I saw her brother and her three year-old nephew this past weekend, her little nephew asked his dad to take him to the toilet, and then when he was walking there put his hands on the back of his pants and made a pushing-in type motion -- he had an accident, it turns out, and like my friend's brother was saying, "He was trying to shove the head back in the turtle".