Every Tom, Dick and Ozzy

Warning - the following content is - well - just be warned, is all.

It's wonderful to marry and then proceed to give birth to the sort of people who enjoy the same things that you do and - better yet - who can make you laugh. I've established that my family is musical, but we are also all avid readers. We've always talked about the books we read with each other, and we particularly encourage Liv to do so because she has a lot of trouble when she is asked to summarize a book for school. "What was the book about?" generally prompts an answer that lasts twenty minutes and leaves one feeling like - without having read the book oneself - one could still probably write a pretty decent summary of the summary.

She's working on it.

So we were out to dinner last night and she had just finished a lengthy explanation of the book she'd just finished. Tom jumped on the conversation train and decided to share an anecdote from the book he'd just finished, I Am Ozzy - Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography.

"He was talking about Jack's birth and their decision to have him circumcised. Sharon is half Jewish or something, I don't know - Ozzy sort of writes like he talks. Anyway - he talked about the fact that he himself had several brothers who were not circumcised, but that he was. He asked his mother about it and she shrugged and said it was what was in fashion at the time."

I took a nice long sip of my margarita as he continued.

"So Ozzy said, 'Wait? Because it was in FASHION you cut off the end of my DICK?'"

I forced myself to swallow that mouthful of margarita rather than following my natural impulse to spit. Insert your own spit/swallow joke here - I'll wait.

"Wow. I'd like to thank you for waiting till I had a mouthful of libation before saying 'dick' in front of my daughters."

Laughs all around. When the laughter died down, though, Liv said, "I didn't completely understand all of those words, though."

Ever helpful, her sister answered, "Well, a dick is another name for a boys..."

"Not THAT word!"

Not that word indeed.

My Hero

My sister doesn't read my blog. She just can't sit still long enough to bother. My parents don't read it either. They don't have a computer. Last year I wrote a lot of posts about traveling with my family and I compiled them into a self-published vanity book to give to my parents for Christmas. I gave my sister a copy, too. She can't bother to sit in front of the computer, but I figured it might be a good bathroom book. Everyone's got to sit sometimes.

My parents have shared that little volume with many of their friends. My sister liked it so much she read it 'in one sitting'. Interpret that as you like. Her major complaint, though, was that she wasn't featured enough, "There wasn't enough about ME!"

It's true, I don't write much about her. That has been a conscious decision. I felt that I was respecting her privacy. Turns out I was hurting her feelings. She mentioned last week, over a couple few beers, an incident that had occurred at the pizza shop where we both worked. She said, almost excitedly, "I bet you blogged about THAT!" I hadn't. Wanna hear it?

We had live music pretty regularly at the pizza shop. The owners were a husband/wife team and the husband took more interest in the music. He always let the performers eat and drink free. Most had a slice or two and a couple beers. One guy drank top shelf whiskey all night. It wasn't quite fair, but an equitable solution had yet to be worked out. On one particular evening, the husband wasn't there and the whiskey-drinking performer was. I poured him a drink and handed it to him, as I always did. "You didn't ring that up!" said my boss in her usual acerbic tone.

"It was for the performer."

"And?"

"And your husband always lets the performers drink..."

(In real life, of course, I referred to them by their names and not by their functions. But while my sister has cleared me to talk about her, these three folks have not done the same. It makes the conversation sound stilted, but it was easier for me to relate it this way than to make up names.)

"That's why we are always fucking struggling!" she screamed at me as the bar and restaurant filled up. She was super-classy like that. "Ring up his goddamn drinks! ALL of them!"

I am so non-confrontational. I did as I was told. It felt very wrong - especially since she hadn't informed him - but I did it.

At the end of the night I presented him with his tab. It was hefty. It was, actually, more than he earned for playing that night. He was a little taken aback. And more than a little drunk. He yelled at me. He accused me of padding his bill. He - and I'm really not proud of this part - made me cry.

As he went about tearing down the stage and I went about closing up the shop, my sister came in - more than a little drunk herself. "Why are you crying?" she asked. I braced myself for her to tease me. It would have been in character. But she didn't. As I told her what happened, I watched her morph from lovable happy drunk to volatile angry drunk in seconds flat. As she turned to confront him, I begged her not to. Two drunks fighting about me was not something I needed at that point at all. I just wanted to go home and put the night behind me. But there was no stopping her.

She stepped up onto the stage, poked him to get his attention, and pointed at me. "YOU made MY SISTER cry."

He shrugged and turned to avoid her. He was still stinging from the bill and he just wanted to get out of there fast. But like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, my sister would not be ignored. She cornered him and said, "Who are YOU to make MY SISTER cry?"

He tried again - unsuccessfully - to dodge her.

"My sister is SMART! She has more degrees than you can IMAGINE! She's FUNNY! She's way TOO NICE for her own good! She's TOO GOOD for this place! She was only doing what she was TOLD and you had NO RIGHT to make her cry!" Each of the capitalized words was punctuated by a finger poke to his chest. "That's who SHE is - who are YOU?" It was rhetorical. She didn't give him a chance to answer before the poke fest continued. "YOU? Are a BIG FAT PIECE of WIENER!"

Out of the mouths of drunks. When I relayed the story to her the next day, she said, "I called him a WHAT?"

"A big fat piece of wiener."

"What did I even mean by that?"

"You said it, not me..."

"And I got right in his face?"

"Poked his chest repeatedly."

"He's - like - really tall."

"Yeah - but he's totally old."

"Not to mention drunk."

"Not to mention a big fat piece of wiener."

Don't screw with me, people. My sister's got my back. And a black belt. And not even a tiny bit of fear or restraint. Plus, I don't even like to think about what she might call you if you hurt me.

Time Tick Tick Tickin' in My Head

My family plays a game wherein a word will spark one of us to sing a quick clip of a song containing that word and the rest scramble to sing other songs that contain that word or phrase. Some words and phrases are easier than others. 'Love'? Forget about it - you'll never get 'em all and it isn't even a challenge. 'Rain' and 'Money' are easy words to play. Another easy word? 'Time'.

We could start with my title and easily get to: time is on my side, time for you to stop all of your cryin', if I could put time in a bottle, what time is it? (4:30), time after time... you get the idea. (and if you want to keep it going, far be it for me to stop you...)

Concerning time, there seem to be two schools of thought. There are those who think their time is more important than everyone else's and there are those who think everyone else's time is more important than their own. I fall pretty firmly into the second camp. This manifests in my full blown need to be prompt. If I tell you I will be somewhere at a certain time, it is very likely that I will be there fifteen minutes earlier. I have been known to sit in my car waiting to go in somewhere because I don't wish to appear too eager. I have very successfully instilled this value in my children - so much so that they don't refer to being prompt as being prompt - they refer to it instead as 'being Howardly'. This isn't to say I've never been late for anything ever. Of course I have. Things happen. But I feel genuinely bad about it. I hate the thought that I might be keeping someone waiting - that I might be wasting their time.

I'll make no apologies for that - I think it's a good way to be. It's respectful.

That being said, just because I put a high value on the time of others doesn't mean that I put a low value on my own time. I used to. I used to not mind waiting because I figured anything anyone else was doing was more important than anything I might have wanted to do. Not so anymore. I find myself becoming more and more impatient with people who do not value my time. While being prompt is respectful, taking your own sweet time while someone is waiting for you is rude. I'll wait my turn, certainly. I don't allow myself to become frustrated by long lines. But waiting for a scheduled appointment? That frustrates me much more quickly. It's one thing for me to think someone else's time is important and to respect that by being prompt. It is quite another for them to (essentially) come right out and say that their time is more important than mine.

Time never flies in the waiting room.

A stitch in time saves nine, time waits for no man, everything in it's own time... it seems that lyrics aren't the only place that themes of time are prevalent. Why are we so caught up in time? Is it because we all only have a finite amount of it?

Whoa. I hadn't meant to swim into the deep end. I really just wanted an excuse to use an Anthrax lyric as a post title. That song has been a recurring earworm since the first time I heard it. I hope the time I took to write this post won't push me to be late. I hate to be late (for a very important date, it's late it's late it's late but not too late, it's too late baby now it's too late...)

By Any Other Name

Sorry about the whinefest yesterday - hope you all had cheese!

How awesome is it that instead of rolling your eyes and becoming annoyed with me you all sent me great suggestions and well wishes instead? What a loverly land the blogosphere is.

All the support led to a refreshed attitude today - I'm ready to take on boredom with a sword and a cape. You know, from my couch where I'll be taking it easy. And maybe ordering a cape. Capes are cool. But the sword will probably remain figurative. I wouldn't want to cut anything off and have to convalesce again.

Sooooo. So the new season of 'Saturday Night Live' started up this weekend. It is a much anticipated event in our household as I have been a fan (a BIG fan) from day one. (Yes, I am aware of the fact that that makes me old. Well excuuuuuuuse me.) I have been a fan through the dark eras - always knowing the light would shine again. The hubs is a fan. The kids are fans (And yes, I have turned them on to the old stuff, too.) If Saturday night's offering was any indication, we are heading into a dark era again. A very dark era indeed. We need Justin Timberlake, stat. Preferably in a cape. Bring it on back to humorville. I laughed once and gasped once. In an hour and a half. That is not sufficient. Not at all.

The gasp? When the brand spankin' new girl on her very first show ever dropped an f-bomb on live TV.

I miss Casey and Mikaela (Bish pleeeeze).

But that's not where I intended to go with this.

The one moment I laughed was during Weekend Update, when Seth used two of my go-to funniest words in one joke. He showed us that they're developing new underpants for left handed men, so that the opening will make things, um, easier. His line: No one uses the wiener slot.

The joke was moderately funny, at best. But those words - underpants and wiener - make me giggle every time. Not the concept of them. I'm not twelve (an arguable point, perhaps). The words themselves. They're funny words.

Panties, too. Not as funny as underpants, but pretty funny.

When I was in pre-op, one of the nurses who came to call on me told me to recover quickly so I could go right out and buy myself a pair of pretty panties. Panties is funny, but pretty panties - for some reason - cracked my stuff up. It came from her lips, but my ears heard Spongebob. Her eyes did that Spongebob thing, too. You know. Where he grows eyelashes and they sparkle? Preeettttty paaaaanties. I may or may not have been under the influence of hospital drugs at the time.

'Tis a gift to be simple, and I have been generously gifted indeed.

My dad used to call pancakes and beans pannies and beans. I adopted the first part for quite a long stretch there, paying homage to my dad and not really hearing it. One morning the girls called me on it and pointed out that calling their breakfast 'panties' was unappealing. Well, yeah - I guess so! (Until you add fresh maple syrup. Then you could pretty much call them festering sores and I'd still find the appeal. What's in a name?) They've been pancakes ever since.

So are there any words that just crack your stuff up?

My girls are getting the ball rolling with 'hobo' and 'afro'...