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.