awful

The worst drink I have ever had is this: Gin, a splash of red wine, and olive juice.

Children's television

There is something to be said for kid's programming, and that something is usually "Oh for God's sake please turn off the God-Damn purple dinosaur".  That having been said many times by now, certainly, the programs my kids watch (I will not tolerate Barney no way no how) seem somehow better than most of the stuff I remember having to endure in the presence of young kids in the past.  Now, I realize that I wasn't an adult back when I was a kid....I'll give you a second to process the stupidity of that idea.... so maybe if I could go back with adult eyes and look at the crap that was geared toward young kids when I was a teen, maybe I'd find some appreciation for it.  It seems obvious from the standpoint of a wizened (snort) cynical adult that the reason it seems like the stuff I watched when I was little was awesome, sucked when I was a teen, and then got awesome again now that I'm all growed up, is that being a teen makes you think you know everything and a certain amount of that attitude sticks to your memories like adhesive from Rugrat's stickers you left all over your favorite shirt and forgot to remove before you put in the laundry.

  BUT.  I'm genuinely impressed with some of the stuff I use when I need to get my kids out of my hair for 20 minutes.  From an episode of Sesame Street today, granted, a bastion of kids programming, but still better today that it was long ago I think: Elmo: hahah, Dorothy is imagining Elmo is a Jazz musician playing a violin!  (Dorothy is Elmo's pet goldfish.  For the uninitiated, they do this every episode.  There is a theme and we see a though bubble coming from the goldfish bowl with Elmo dressed up or transformed into this particular....thing.)  In response, a talking violin who is supposed to sound like Rodney Dangerfield I guess says "we're going to watch a  fish think?  This'll be exciting."  whereas in all other segments of Elmo's world before this, it was simply an accepted fact that Dorothy the fish imagines Elmo as what-have-you every episode and we never really question how or why.  Then there was Timmy Time.  A lackluster spin off of Shaun the Sheep which is itself a spin-off of Wallace and Grommet.   There is no dialog, just animal sounds that fill in for speech and we're left to make assumptions about the conversations they have.  Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much, but there you have it, whatever its worth.  Today Timmy imagined himself a pirate.  Again with the animal fantasies, I know, maybe this is the standard of comedy now - in his fantasy he is wearing all the trappings of piratehood; eyepatch, parrot, etc.  But he's still a sheep, so what does he say that still fits with the no-dialog format as he looks through his spyglass?  "Baaaarrrrrr!"
I have to admit.  I laughed.  Something happens in most of these shows that makes me laugh, but I wonder if the writers/creators have really gotten better at throwing us parent's a bone now and then, or if they've always been doing that and when I was a kid ai was too jaded or stupid to notice.

Xanax

I really like Xanax - or rather I really like the chemical name for Xanax.  It's Alprazolam.
Alprazolam....
It sounds like something Jimmy Walker would say.
Alprazo-LAM!

cap

J proudly presented me with the cap to a very large, bright blue bottle of finger paint today.

Walker

You know those sticky rubbery things you used to get in gumball machines when you were a kid - you'd throw them against the wall and they'd "walk" down it by virtue of their stickiness....If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm afraid you never will because I have no idea what they were called.  At any rate, I recaptured my youth this morning when I gave my kids their gummy vitamins and my youngest, J, decided he didn't want his - after sucking on it for a while.  I picked him up not knowing he had it in his sticky little hand and then I felt something cold and wet drop onto my arm and I watched it as it rolled very slowly, sloppily down my arm, leaving a trail of sugary slime as it walked end over end.

Facebook is not for Bloggers

Not for writers of any kind really, unless you're some kind of freaky...writes-nonstop-forgoing-sleep-food-sex-and-everything-else-type of writers and you really do have time to waste.  Because FB is really just a blog.  Or a mini-blog.  Most people don't write more than a few sentences per post.  It's a blog that your friends and relatives are required to read, because they can't pretend they don't know it exists, and if in person a topic comes up that you've been 'booking on lately and they have no idea what you're talking about, they're going to know you aren't reading.  The only way out is to not use it.

I...I haven't entirely succeeded at that.
Of course it wasn't such a danger when I first adopted, either.Yes it's fun.  It's nice as someone who likes to make people laugh to have a quick and easy outlet for that.  Anytime something funny pops in my head, I can just post it and get a few laughs in return, or at least a few likes.  That's the hook, of course.  Validation.  I admit I got sucked in, too.

I don't think I've written anything more than a paragraph or two since  FB became the time-gobbling singularity that it is.  That's no good.  I've taken FB vacations before, and it was refreshing, but I did always go back.

Thing is, I have a drive to write.  I like not only creating something worth reading but I like the process too, even when it is mostly fruitless.  I like doing just this, forming an idea in my head, simple as it may be, and putting it into a form that other people can understand and interpret.  That's all language is, and I revel in it.  But I relished the feedback more.  I like to know, right away, that  someone read it, understood what I was driving at, and appreciated my craft.

Patience.  I need to learn ever more patience, discipline, and self-control.
Odd that I feel like I already have a lot of those things, more than many other people, more than some other more-successful writers.

...Or maybe that's why I don't write....

So very very tired.  Kids are exhausting.  D has to give up the binkies.  All those articles that say pacifiers don't cause orthodontic problems, apparently not entirely true.  D has a major overbite already.  She's not thrilled about giving them up.  I explained to her that there would be no more binkies.  I'm pretty sure she understood the concept even though she didn't acknowledge that she understood because she's been avoiding taking a  nap all day.  J hasn't been helping. He has napped about 45 minutes today all day, the kid who can take 2, 2-hour naps some days.  And boy is he whiny too.  Yesterday he was an angel all day.  Very little whining.  playing, having fun, with us or by himself, slept all night.  Babies, mood swings, advil, coffee, *thunk*.

 
I don't understand the trend in mega-food lately. the Doritos taco, the doubledown, the turducken....
I've had turducken, it was sorta meh.
it's like when you're a kid fingerpainting and you put a little green on the page and little blue and little purple and you think, "This is awesome!  But I bet I know how to make it the awesomest picture ever, I'm going to use ALL THE COLORS ALL AT ONCE."  And you glob them all on there and it turns into mud.   Every time.  No matter how much you mix it together.  All of the devil dogs wrapped in tacos on a fish pizza foods...it's all mud to me.