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".