This morning while waiting outside for Alex’s school bus with Alex and my best friend John, I lifted my right hand to point at something and felt a shooting pain through my shoulder. I moaned. Not normally being one to complain about aches and pains, I thought about what made me so miserable where this shoulder thing is concerned.
Being that I was diagnosed with arthritis in it, I explained to John that pain has never really bothered me that much. I just live with it. But I realise it’s different this time, because I’m not sure it’ll ever go away: I may very well have to suffer with this one for the rest of my life.
I suppose just saying that made me deserve what was to come. At the house of the second customer on my paper route, I missed a step on the way down and landed on my knee on their brick pathway.
It could have been worse though – I could be out in the torrential downpour I’m watching through the window as I type this.
It’s true! A tuna has taken up residence under my front steps. What’s worse, there may be more than one!
Okay, by now you’re probably asking yourself what the hell I’m talking about. Let me tell you a story.
One fine evening when my eldest son was about a year old, my ex and I decided to go for a walk around the block, baby in carriage. It was spring, just like it is now, and the lilacs were blooming their fragrant heads off. The bumble bees were in heaven, and there were plenty of them. Their low pitched drones could be heard as they busily buzzed from blossom to blossom.
In the thick of it all, my ex decided that it might be the best idea for me to push the carriage. When I inquired why, he explained.
Now there are two things you need to know about my ex at this point. One, is that he is French. Quebecois. And two, that he is deathly afraid of bees.
His explanation for not wanting to push the carriage containing our child was as follows:
Because if I see a taon, I’m going to run.
Taon is the French word for horsefly, deer fly… but he meant bumble bee.
What I heard was thon, which is French for tuna.
Many minutes passed before I was able to get up off the ground from laughing so hard. When I could finally speak, with tears running down my face, I told him he could push the carriage because it didn’t matter – if I saw a tuna, I was going to run as well.
So there you have it. I have a tuna living under my steps. I won’t be telling my ex though – I won’t see him again until winter if I do.
That awkward moment when you’re concentrating really hard on making the bed until you realize that all three of you are sticking your tongues out but you’re the only one without ice cream.
01:00 – The thirteen year old comes to my room to say he needs to be covered up again. I get up because he won’t leave me alone until I do, and the more he fusses, the more he wakes up.
02:01 – Cell phone rings. Squint at the number. Don’t recognize it. Decline call.
02:02 – Roll over to go back to sleep. Get cramp in left foot. Writhe until cramp goes away.
02:03 – Get comfortable again. Notice light in my eyes. Open them to be blinded by rays of moonlight like laser beams coming through window. Roll over.
02:04 – Am awake, wondering if the phone call was from eldest son, lost, alone on the side of the highway, with a phone he plucked from the cold dead body of the guy he’d just seen run over. (Okay, the body wouldn’t be cold yet, but you get the picture.)
02:25 – Thinks about getting up to write this post.
02:30-02:54 – Drifts back off to sleep.
02:55 – Cell phone rings. Answers it. Loud talking in the background and then a voice says, “Wrong number,” and hangs up.
02:56 – Cell phone rings again. Answers it. Person hangs up.
02:57 – Cell phone rings … again. Answers it. Lots of noise: voice says, “Still wrong number.” Well DUH!! Am clearly dealing with a rocket scientist.
02:57 – Cell phone rings. Picks up and listens. Voice says, “I think the number’s 0215…” Resists temptation to say, “YES! Try that!” They hang up.
03:00 – (While failing to get back to sleep.) Imagines how it might be possible to replicate fax machine noise for next phone call.
03:27 – Considers getting up to write post which will include phone number of non-rocket scientist so that people all over the world can phone said doo-doo at 2 and 3 every morning for the next week.
03:41 – Tries to figure out how to say 999,999 in Japanese.
03:50 (or so) – Drifts off to sleep.
06:25 – Thirteen year old wakes me up to let me know he’s going downstairs and that he’s going to let me sleep for another half an hour. Goes downstairs and proceeds to scream at TV for half an hour.
06:55 – Phone rings … cousin in England has forgotten yet again how many hours difference there are…
It’s going to be a long two weeks until I’m able to sleep again.
My mother, talking to me on her cellphone: I’ll make sure I keep my phone with me tomorrow, in case you call – I just have to find where I put the bloody thing now.
Diversity is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Well, not always.
If you’re at all sociable: whether you go out of the house, or stay in and spend your days on the internet, you’re bound to meet someone who gets on your nerves. I remember when my ex and I started dating. Everything was flowers and wine and laughter… and then I found out he was a morning person. I, on the other hand, am not one for more than a grunt if you’re lucky before my first coffee, so the singing coming from the direction of the shower was enough to set my teeth on edge.
While that wasn’t actually painful, I do now at times feel physical discomfort when I come across someone whose nature is completely different to mine. Take, for instance, people who live in a constant state of drama. I have enough real life problems to even consider worrying about who has pissed off whom and how they’re going to badmouth them until everyone else hates them. And it happens everywhere! Social media, high schools, offices and even old-age homes.
What I don’t understand is, why do people do this to themselves? Why can’t people just live and let live? So what if so-and-so is pissing you off? Ignore them. Don’t let them pull you into their world of misery. I certainly didn’t let my ex get the best of me with his early morning glee, and since he was still serenading the shower head when we broke up, I sure didn’t do anything to stifle him. Then again, maybe by that time he was doing it just to get on my nerves.
I know I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: life is too short. I think if we can all accept that not everyone is the same as us, that we all have our quirks, our opinions, and our preferences in life, we could all be so much happier.
Stop trying to change people. Embrace their differences. Just not necessarily in the shower.
In attempting to come up with something new to write here today, I realized there doesn’t seem to be much left of my present life that I haven’t already written about. In short, I’m running out of things to say.
I have this vision in my head of me and you sitting in a restaurant, eating a meal and looking around at the other couples – the young ones holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, *gag* and the middle aged ones with kids, arguing over whether Bobby should get a new computer for his fourth birthday – and having nothing to say to one another. We’ve already talked about the weather and how bad the traffic was to get here.
Your teeth hitting the spoon every time you sip your soup is getting on my nerves.
Your memories of how sexy I was when we first met are fading even as the colour in your favourite cardigan does every time I wash it – it’s a horrible burnt orange and I’ve been secretly putting a drop of bleach in the water for about six months. I figure if it finally goes yellow you’ll stop wearing it.
Is that how things are going to end up with us, WordPress? Is it?
Come on, my dear. Let’s spice that plate of bits and bytes up, shall we? Before I have to face your dentures in a pot beside the sink in the bathroom every night.
I can pull off 50,000 words with no problem. Yeah, okay – it takes me a while. But out of those 50,000 or 5,000 or even … whatever … the words that I get the most stuck on are those pesky noises that come out of our mouths and noses that there are no words for. In fact, it makes steam whistle out of my ears.
Image courtesy of pixabay.com
Some noises are much easier than others, admittedly. Onomatopoeia is a wonderful thing for sounds like banging, clanking and sneezing. The list goes on and on. But what about coughing? “Khe, khe, khe!” How about a sound of derision? “Pff!” Yeah, that’s easy. So many of them are so hard though!
I was quite proud of myself when I came up with the sound for blowing a raspberry. But then people didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
So I’m making it official. And feel free to use it any time. This, “Pthththththth” denotes blowing a raspberry.
As for yodeling? Pthththth. I’m not even going to try.
“How many bugs in a box?” It’s a stupid little song that has been going through my head for years. When I’ve finished writing this post (because I don’t want to stop) I’ll look it up and if I can, insert it so that everyone can be tormented by it.
It’s from an animated game for the computer that my kids used to play when they were little. The game was called “How Many Bugs in a Box” and it was a counting/math/number/pattern recognition game. Why am I writing about this? Because every time – and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME – I try to write a blog post I think of that sentence. The question has been plaguing me now for around fifteen years. Fifteen years of wondering how many bugs are in the damned box!
Why is it that songs get stuck in our heads, anyway? There’s a name for it now: ear worm. Usually it lasts a morning, or a few hours after we either think of a song or hear it after not having heard it for a long time. It doesn’t usually happen – at least in my experience – when it’s something that’s on the radio or my playlist all the time. I think my worst ones to date have to be “C is for Cookie” by the Cookie Monster, or “The Song that Never Ends” by whatshername with the lamb puppet. (Holy crap, “whatshername” didn’t get a red squiggly line underneath it!)
Anyway, by finally writing “how many bugs in a box” in a blog post, I’m hoping to dispell the magic that keeps me wanting to come back to it. I’ll let you know if it worked in another post. Maybe in next week’s SoCS post.
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