What Trauma Did You Inflict On Your Nose That Made You Unable To Smell That????

  I have a real issue with something, and my sister laughs at me and calls me strange, and well, that's not really the worst thing that she has ever called me, but I digress. This issue that gives her the giggles is my pet peeve about people buying rotten potatoes, and the fact that I won't buy potatoes bagged in plastic. If I buy bagged potatoes, they have to be in netting, and I have to be able to see every single one of them. Otherwise, I am picking through the potato bin, because to me, there are no smells that I have come across that smells worse than a rotten potato.
   I know, this is strange. I can hardly blame my sister for calling me strange and a weirdo, but I work as a cashier, lets not forget. And this is relevant because all of you little food eaters, you shop at grocery stores. And most of you buy potatoes. And I have to scan those potatoes when you come through my line with them, and when they are rotten.... it's really bad.
   Have you ever smelled rotten potatoes? This is the thing that I cannot fathom: why do people keep coming through my line with a bag of potatoes that obviously has at least one bad one in it? Because that smell, really strong. To describe the smell, I would have to say imagine a three day old dead fish left in the sun to rot, except worse. How can you not smell that? My sister swears that she can't smell that, but I think maybe she killed her sense of smell somehow, because it's really strong. Sick to my stomach strong. And even worse that the smell is the amount of liquid that bad potatoes produce. They produce pools of liquid muck that carries the smell, so that when a customer slams a bag of grody decay onto my belt, the liquid oozes into the cracks of the conveyor belt, which means that I am smelling that God-awful, sick-to-my-stomach, nose-hair-melting smell ALL DAY LONG. Not to mention that when I pick up the bag, usually some of the liquid gets on my hands, and no amount of hand sanitizer removes that smell; you need a full scrub, and I am talking a ten minute surgeon scrub, not some little rinse and dry. Otherwise, that smell is going to stick to your hands and  you are going to smell that smell wherever you go, and frankly, in my own opinion, skunk smells better.
   So good luck with that stink, but me, I'll pass. These days, I've memorized all the PLU codes (codes that we enter for produce, which pulls up the price, if you didn't know) to the bagged potatoes, so if you come across the cashier frantically saying "I don't need the potatoes on the belt!!!" Well,  there's a good chance that you've met me.
   But seriously, this is why my sister calls me weird, but I am not sure that I am willing to take that from her. This woman swears that she can smell fevers, so who's the weirdo?

Happy (Almost) Mother's Day

Better than flowers and hangs right in the entry.

   Mother's Day. The day to celebrate the perfect mother: the one who has perfect hair, and perfect clothes, the perfect body, and the perfect culinary skills. Okay, whatever. Now put the fake mommy delusion back on the shelf with the rest of those sentimental bullshit Mother's Day cards, and let's celebrate real moms.
   Real moms know that stepping on a lego or a toy car is the best way to find out how many cuss words you can say in under a minute, because that shit HURTS. We watch our kids somersault off of the back of the couch, ricochet off the wall and slam face first into the coffee table, and then get up like nothing happened and laugh at us because we are making hilarious faces while we recover from the massive heart attack that we just experienced. Real moms stay up until four in the morning with sick kids, then turn around and get up at seven to go to work and pray to God that they do not end the day explaining to the police why they turned into a homicidal maniac.
    We aren't perfect. We are real people, and we have days when the kiddos are gonna damn well eat some corn dogs or hot pockets because if we end up in the kitchen today, someone is gonna die. Our houses look lived in instead of spotless because cleaning up after kids is like trying to dig your way to China; no matter how much work you do, there is still more dirt. We get blood on our good clothes because we need to clean and kiss a boo-boo and make it all better. We try not to gag as we clean off buggery faces while we wonder why the hell the kiddo's snot is that strange-ass color. We assist in making mud pies, in planting stick gardens, and building forts.

She made it black because that's my favorite color. 

   When the kiddos need help with homework, we are the ones furtively sneaking online, because we can't even remember what the heck the quadrilateral formulas are, and we bite our tongues and suffer through it even though at no time since the end of school have we needed to know quadrilateral formulas, which is why we can't remember them in the first place. We encourage the entrance of experiments into the school science fairs while hoping desperately that nothing blows up or catches fire. We go to school choir concerts instead of rock concerts, and we chaperon field trips even though we don't feel like dealing with other peoples' kids. We laminate artwork, and hang that shit up on the wall like they are priceless masterpieces, because to us, they are.
    This is being a mom. We can't be described by some sentimental poem on a Hallmark card, because we are better than that fake piece of perfection. We transcend the need for perfection, because the best mom; she's someone real: someone who makes mistakes. She's someone who gets up and holds the house together even when she feels like she is going to explode. She has mornings when she yells at everyone because no one seems to be able to get their ass in gear, and she has evenings where the dishes are going to stay dirty because she needs to go to bed early and forget that the stupid day ever happened. This is motherhood; this is what we celebrate on Mother's Day. So happy Mother's Day, to all you real moms out there. I hope you have a great day.

Survival Horror Games

   Resident Evil was the first. The one that started my fascination with survival horror games; I love being terrified to open a door on a video game because something freaky as hell is going to pop out. This started my love of horror games even though I really suck at them. I really do; and don't play 2 player with me because I WILL shoot you in the back, and it will be on accident, but your character will still be dead, and a few seconds later, mine will be dead as well. I do better in single player modes, where I can't accidentally shoot my ally. And this is a good thing, because my family won't play that shit with me even if I wanted them too.
   Which is funny, because that first Resident Evil? That was my sister's game. She bought that shit and brought it home when we were wet-nosed little tykes getting on our mother's last damn nerve. And now? She won't play that shit. She is scared. Bock-bock-bock chicken. But she loves to watch me play, she just stresses too much if she is in control, and she won't move and her character will literally just stand there because she is too worried about what is behind the door. The creepy music starts playing and you know something is fixing to happen, and she is covering her eyes with her hands and telling me to tell her when it's over. She won't play them, but she comes over to my apartment to watch me play, which is nice for me because I'm bock-bock-bock chicken too, but I can be braver if I have someone with me.

This game is scary.

   But the big thing is, if you play these games, you might have realized that they are not scary anymore. Resident Evil is basically a shooter now, with hordes of zombies sure, but the fear factor is gone and in it's place is the need to kill as many mutated T-virus infectees as possible, and that's not really scary. Not to me. And I think I am right because my daughter, she can watch the new Resident Evil games, and while you might be thinking, "You let her watch that crap?" the answer is "Yes." Because my daughter has a unique ability not shared by many -- if she doesn't like seeing something, she leaves the room. If it freaks her out, she walks away and goes to her room to watch Animal Planet or Disney or play Mario on her Wii. She's a smart girl. Which means that Resident Evil: the new games don't scare her because she doesn't leave. But let me start playing Fatal Frame: she is gone. Uh-uh, no way, she isn't watching that if you paid her. That's how I really know that survival horror games just aren't horrifying anymore.
    So this is my gripe. I love the old games, and I was thrilled when Fatal Frame was available for download off of the Playstation Network, but where are the new scary games? How are we going to raise a new generation of survival horror-gamers if all we have is weak-ass, non-scary shooters pretending to be horror? I know that this is just my own opinion, but I still think it's a valid complaint. I know that I have heard this same gripe out of other people's mouths, so I know that I am not alone. Bring back survival horror!!!

My Education Rant

   Every parent that has their child enrolled in the joke that we call the public education system has some kind of major issue with the way our schools are run. I have a bunch of them. I can't help having them; this is my child. Of course I am going to be concerned about the education she gets.
  One of my issues is all this testing. I don't agree with all the damn testing that the kids have to do. I'm not just talking about the standardized testing that they do once a year, although that sucks. My daughter loves

school, but they are doing that MSP testing right now, and she is all tense on the days that are her turn for the testing. And my daughter is good at tests. She has not made a bad score on any of those standardized tests; in fact, she tends to blow those standardized tests right out of the water. And my feelings are thus: if my daughter is so nervous about them, what about the poor kids that don't do well on tests? I feel so bad for those kids, because these tests are not a true measure of their knowledge or skill. And that isn't all the testing anymore. They get weekly tests on math that are timed and they get AR tests on their reading. I could never pass one of the timed  math tests that my daughter has to take. I can work the problems eventually, but not all 50 of them in ten minutes. Not happening. And AR testing? My daughter picks up a book, and she doesn't wonder if the story is good. She wonders how many points she will get for AR testing. See, for those of you that are not familiar with AR testing, each book is worth a certain amount of points, and at the end of the book, you take a test, and the amount of points you get is based on how many questions you got right. This is not what reading should be about, in my mind.
   I have an issue with all this testing because I feel for the kids that aren't good at taking tests. I am not good at taking tests, so of course I have sympathy. My mind does crazy things come test time. I'll be trying to find out what x equals, and my mind will wander and the next thing you know, I am not thinking about PEMDAS,  I am thinking about what would happen if Wolverine caught Umbrella's T-virus... Or I am trying to remember what the cons are to wind power for my environmental science, and I start thinking that it's lucky that fictional worlds seem to lack STDs, because otherwise all those people in the Game of Thrones would have genital herpes. My mind wanders to these strange places when I am trying to test, and if a grown-ass woman has these types of problems testing, you can bet that some of the little kiddies do too.
   This does not mean that I think that all the kids should be passed just for effort, or that I believe in encouraging slackers, but this does return me to one of my most familiar gripes: the insistence of society that all people fit into the cookie-cutter molds. Kids do not learn in the same way, because THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. So these tests that some kids have problems passing, all they are showing is that these kids are not getting taught in a way that connects with them.
   Which brings me to my second big issue: funding. Teachers: bless their big-ass hearts, because they make shit money, and their classes are overcrowded and they often don't have recent equipment, such as texts and computers, ect. Each kid is gonna learn differently, but try teaching every kid differently when you have thirty kids in a class and an hour for the subject. It's not gonna happen. And every time the state calls for a budget cut, what goes first? Well, I don't know about all your states, but here in Washington, it seems to be public education funding. How is that good planning? We need to pull ourselves out of a recession, and how are fixing it? By making sure the next generation is twice as ignorant as we are? Not a good plan, there. Forget the next generation of scientists and doctors and teachers and politicians; we are raising the next generation of 16 and pregnant. Whoopee!! Who needs an education? Because by making public education our last priority, we are sending the message that education doesn't matter. Because if it did, we would have cut the funding for the new lanes at the four-way stop outside of my work and left the school's already depleted funds alone. The new lanes went in, and certain after school activities were cut from my daughter's school. Makes sense, right?
   Oh, the trouble our educational system is in. I have a smart, smart daughter, but she is an easy kid to teach.  Doesn't mean that she is smarter than a kid that is harder to teach, all this means is that she makes connections more easily. And I don't really have the answers; I just know that we have a problem that needs a solution. It's a conundrum. 

Little Talks

   My daughter says some crazy things, and she always has. In order to capture the zany attitude that my daughter possesses, I have kept record of some of the conversations that I have had with her. And of course, now I am going to share them with you.
Butt Cracks
   This first one happened before she was even in school; while I was on the phone with my sister before she moved to Washington and still lived in Kansas, and I noticed that my daughter's pants had fallen down.
   Me: "Honey, pull up your pants; your butt crack is showing."
   My daughter, extremely offended, "My butt is NOT cracking!!!"
   And my sister heard her response and still gets a chuckle off of the memory.
Babies And Where They Come From
   This one happened in Kindergarten in the line waiting for school to start.
    My daughter to her friend, "My Auntie told me where babies come from!"
    A bunch of excited ass kids start listening avidly like she has discovered the secret of Santa Claus, and my daughter continues, "People have babies the same way chickens do!!!"
    My daughter's confused friend, "But how do chickens have babies?"
    My daughter, "I don't know but I'm gonna find out! They have animal books in the library."
    Another kid, "We can watch Animal Planet!"
   Me to the other parents who are now giving me the stink eye, "I had nothing to do with this, I swear."
   Later, after school and after I explain that human babies and chicken babies really have nothing in common, she asks me again where babies come from. "You don't really want to know, honey," I say.
   "Yes I do, and I'm never gonna stop asking until you tell me!" she exclaims.
    "Okay, but I warned you. Babies are made when a momma sleeps with a daddy-"
    "Stop! Stop!" screams my daughter, "You're disgusting! Don't talk to me anymore!"
    "You asked."
    "Nope. Don't talk to me."

I'm not eating whatever that thing is, especially if it's soupy. YUCK

What The Heck Are You Asking Me To Eat?
   My daughter after school, more recently, probably about a few months ago.
   "Mom, we need to have soupy-chicken-fish for dinner."
   "What the hell is that, and whatever it is, I'm not eating that."
   My daughter, giggling, "But Mom, I want spoupy-chicken fish."
   "No. How about chicken?"
    "Is it soupy?"
    "That is disgusting."
Death By A Zombie-Spider-Octopus-Eagle-Dragon-Scorpion-Lobster-Acorn
    "I made up a new monster in school today!" my daughter tells me as I pick her up and hands me a picture of some freaky thing that she imagined. "It's a zombie-spider-octopus-eagle-dragon-scorpion-lobster-acorn."

Better than a normal zombie. 

   "Say that again."
   "And you want to be killed by it instead of a regular old zombie."
   "Um, no. Say that name again though. Really fast."
   "Yes you do. Why would you want to meet a regular old zombie when you could meet this."
   "I'll pass. Say that name again."
   "You love zombies though. You want to be eaten by mine," my daughter says between giggles.
   "No. Say the name again."
    "I can't. I can't remember what was in it. I'll write it down when I get home and can look at it."