Welcome to Heidi - From Psychics to Skinny Chicks

Because I can’t leave anything alone if there’s a chance I can poke it with a stick and come up with another punchline, I’ve been pondering the Koo Koo for Cocoa Puffs chapter in Welcome to Heidi, the new Heidi Clements fictional (Sure, there’s a few embellishments. Nobody wants their life story to read like a peel-off coupon) memoir. 

After checking out the relationship with her psychic (“who may or may not kill things in order to make my dreams come true”), I can’t help thinking there are probably times in all of our lives when we would take a chance with somebody who could steer us to Prince Charming. . .or away from that investment in kitten ear muffs.  Or who could silence that coworker who orders personal products on her cell phone. In the cubicle next to you. During your lunchtime tuna salad break.

So here are a few times I could use a psychic to move things along. Don’t lie; you can think of a few times, too.  Remember when you were extra-pregnant and your brother-in-law said you looked like an overloaded washtub. . .

1.      I really need to pass the test to secure my major in Business Ethics and I’ve just discovered that downing tequila shots the night before is not a viable study aid.

2.      When I really need a raise to buy the dress that will make me look like Kate Upton on her best day and it would help speed things along if I knew the true relationship between my boss and the Vending Machine Supervisor.

3.      When my lifelong adversary is receiving the achievement award I’ve already written my acceptance speech for and I want to wear the same dress in a size smaller to the recognition dinner.

4.      When my ex-husband, The Defendant, is escorting the 24 year old beautician with the Taylor Swift hair to dinner at “our” restaurant and I want to know where he parked because I still have the spare key to his car.

5.      When the lottery is topping out at 500 million and I’m trying to decide whether to go for groceries or spring for the extra buck to Power Up the ticket I just snagged at the Zippy Mart.

6.      My niece/nephew/other impressionable child just heard my opinion of the driver who careened into my lane and put on brakes and I need to make sure he doesn’t share my views during tea with the Ladies’ Bible class.

7.      I’m on Let’s Make a Deal and don’t want to miss out on the Big Deal of the Day because I am in desperate need of a trip to Tahiti and a bass boat.

8.      I’m at my class reunion and can’t figure out who the skinny chick is who keeps harping on “that great time we had at Nag’s Head.”

9.      I can’t tell which clothes are in the “semi-soiled but still fits” pile and which is the “clean, but Twiggy couldn’t get in to it” stack and I don’t want to risk a deal-breaker by putting on a dress that could double as a personal massager.

10.  I want a chicken for supper and need somebody with experience in making that happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Point and Shoot

I was born in February and I’m a little concerned that the symbol for my birthday month is a fat, naked stalker baby with underdeveloped wings and a bow and arrow. I don’t know about you, but I go some places a baby should be afraid to follow, even armed with projectiles.

Somehow the thought of an undiapered toddler, especially one packing a weapon designed to shoot warm fuzzies, accompanying me to the mall clearance sales and auto-flushers seems horribly inappropriate. I still bear a French manicure-shaped scar from reaching for a cunning pair of Capri pants on the red dot clearance rack. If that naked baby grabs the last pair of Prada pumps on the sale table, he’s likely to lose something more important than a finger.

I can see why he’s armed. Anybody named Cupid who goes parading around in his birthday suit is likely to suffer grievous knuckle prints from guys named Pork Chop or Tiny here in the red mud section of South Carolina. And if he ventures out to watch the Nascar drivers go fast and turn left, he just may get tire marks someplace where parking is prohibited.

So just to be sure we’re on the same track, I checked with Cupid to see how he felt about his job.

Me: So, Cupid, how does it feel to go to work naked every day?

Cupid, the God of Love: Well, I save a lot on dry cleaning and there’s no dress code, so it’s kind of empowering. I use an awful lot of Chap-Stick, though. I’m trying for a corporate sponsorship. My endorsement deals keep me living in the life style of my dreams.

Me: You dream of flying naked for the rest of eternity?

Cupid: Don’t knock it. Even in the weather that frosts my feathers, it beats a business suit and 80-hour work weeks. And I don't have any place to carry a cell phone, so the boss can't ever call me on my lunch hour.

Me: But do you think it’s safe for a baby to fly around by himself?

Cupid: It’s not like I’m unarmed. (He tested the point on a heart-tipped arrow.) Hey, I’m the one that made Kanye apologize to Taylor Swift. It didn’t matter where I hit him. I just grazed him to let all the hot air out.

Me: If you’re such a sure shot, why are there so many divorces? You know, I’ve been married before and I’d rather shave my legs with a potato peeler than go through that again.

Cupid: Hey, everybody makes mistakes. Actually I was aiming for someone else, but, when you bent over it was like a heat seeking missile and a barn fire.

Me: So you’re saying the whole fiasco was my fault?

Cupid: Well every action has an opposite and equal unexpected consequence. That’s math you know. Or science. Whatever. I was a Liberal Arts major.

Me: I can identify with that. I graduated with honors, but they don’t take GPA in the Express Lane at the Piggly Wiggly.

Cupid: Well, don’t be eyeing my job. I had to knock off a guy with winged feet to get this gig.

Me: So once Valentine’s Day is past, it’s the off season for you. What keeps you busy the rest of the year?

Cupid: Oh, there’s lots to do. I like to spend part of the summer posing as a sculpture in a wishing well fountain. All that loose change comes in handy for the bathroom vending machines.

Me: Is that all you do? Make people think their wishes will come true, then steal their money?

Cupid: Of course not. Somebody’s got to keep up with the Kardashian sisters. Those gals make Snooki look like Hannah Montana. I think I’m gonna need a bigger box of arrows.

Bowl Bound or Busted

If you thought exercising in front of the kids when they were little was a Stephen King movie waiting to happen, you'll find that working out in front of teenagers is like hanging your handwashables out to dry across the information superhighway. If there’s not a video of your behind crouched in a downward dog position on YouTube before you’re done with the stretches, these kids think they’re not doing their job.

At least when the children were six, they would make entertaining attempts to do the exercises with me. Today they take pictures with their cell phones and compose humorous captions before texting them to distant relatives and global news sites.

And they’re not afraid to broadcast interesting body fat tidbits. When the kids were little they said things like, “Who is that lady on the video?” (That’s Richard Simmons, Sweetie.) Where did your belly button go? (It disappeared about the time I sent out the birth announcements.)

These days they say things like, “Is that a hula hoop or a belt?” Since I’m wedged into the thing like preteens in the front row of a Taylor Swift concert, I don’t have a clever answer ready. I’m more concerned with getting the plastic wedgie out from under my lung so I can breathe. Having a playground toy jammed through my ribcage like a pierced earring is not a good look for me. I know. I saw the "After" shots on the FAIL blog.

The last time I let my band of ruffians, er teenage citizens, in the house while I was doing my bellydance workout, I checked my FaceBook page later only to find out I’d been sponsored by Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig had ignored my friend request, and an anonymous poster left ten tips to a bikini-ready body written in a sarcastic font.

Then one day a host of fleshy cherubs in workout gear appeared before me on my 48 inch plasma screen. I thought it was The Biggest Loser, Angel Edition. “We saw you on You Tube and decided you needed some help. Seek out the promised land!”

That’s the day I packed up my workout gear and headed to my own turf. These days it’s kind of hard to do squats without flushing the toilet, or perform proper lunges without knocking the shower massage into nail-driver position, but I can exercise without the benefit of back seat drivers.

Now if I could just get the Tidy Bowl man to stop heckling me from the cheap seats.

Not Talking Turkey - My Top Ten List

I have a friend who writes a witty letter to send to the far reaches of her family at Christmas time every year. Since I never purposely steal anyone’s idea unless I can do it better or score first blood, I decided to compose an annual Thanksgiving letter instead, so that mine will be done before she gets out her shiny balls and Ho Ho’s. But on further reflection, I don’t want to risk competing with a lady who has enough culture to inquire, “What wine goes with roadkill?”

Therefore, in an act of stubborn cowardice, I have decided instead to present the top ten list of things I’ve learned this year. There’s been a lot of study material.

I learned that Life Lessons are either immensely painful or expensive. And also that one does not exclude the other.

I learned that driving a kidney patient to the hospital requires you to slow down, at least over the railroad tracks.

I learned that kidneys must be emptied more often than pockets at a police station and that the announcement that a patient’s kidneys are about to explode like the planet Alderan under attack from a fully functional Death Star shortens the wait at the Emergency Room immensely.

Transporting the patient home across the same railroad tracks, I learned that men with catheters DO NOT have a sense of humor.

I learned that the insurance company will pay for a bandaid quite cheerfully, but morphine requires an offering of type O positive and Taylor Swift tickets with backstage passes for the daughter of the insurance company’s CEO—and 350 of her closest friends.

I learned that if the kidney patient schedules a physical to see if anything else is wrong; something will be.

I learned that triglycerides are neither a good name for a rock band, nor a circus acrobatic act that revolves around a three-wheeled vehicle.

I learned to appreciate whole grain bread, lean meats, garden vegetables, and fresh fruit.

I learned that “refrigerate after opening” doesn’t necessarily apply to fresh fruit.

I learned that poached, grilled, boiled, and baked fish are still basically fish. Unless corn meal and hot grease are involved, all recipes are the same. Disclaimer: This is just an observation. I like fish. Please do not send me your recipe. I rejected Martha Stewart and I’ll reject you.

I learned that even though Life Lessons are expensive and painful and fraught with adventures that make you late for supper, having a healthy husband makes it all worthwhile. Tomorrow, between the green beans and Splenda-sweetened tea, I'll be putting in a word of thanks for that.

(Of course, that’s 11 things on the list. But when it comes to lessons, I was always an overachiever anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, Honey!)

The Other End of the Telescope

I have it on good authority (Wikipedia or The Smoking Gun, I can’t remember which) that sometimes when people make discoveries or craft clever inventions that could change the face of the world, they irresponsibly share their findings with other people instead of keeping the whole thing to themselves to pass off to huge conglomerates later for outstanding sums of money.

That’s what a man named Galileo did all those dusty years ago and is the reason I am now sorting through headlines that shout peculiar things about the public display of various bits of Galileo’s anatomy, which somehow became separated from the whole of Galileo in general. If you’re interested at all in the science of mathematics, you’ll be excited to hear that these random pieces are known as fractions, and therefore Galileo is still teaching us things long after he was buried, which is when he did the most traveling.

It seems that Galileo Galilei, which would be a smashing name for a romance novelist, came to be known by the Church as a Very Bad Boy. Back then Church was spoken with a capital C and in charge of the way people thought about things. Today Kanye West and Taylor Swift take care of all that.

The Church was mad because after Galileo invented a nifty tool called the telescope, he found out that the earth spun circles around the sun instead of the other way around, which caused me to fail Physical Science and send my Grade Point Average, which is essential for getting allowance, into the dumpster.

The Church put Galileo under arrest in his house where he whiled away the last years of his life playing video games in the basement instead of inventing more stuff like You Tube or Google or things like that which would make life easier for those of us who were grounded for making bad grades in science.

The Church wouldn’t let Galileo, whose name begins to look funny after you write it a lot, be buried any place good like under the Hollywood sign or on Broadway. So a long time after he died, people who secretly liked the telescope because they could use it to spy on their neighbors who should keep the curtains closed anyway, dug up Galileo’s bones and took him to be buried near his best friend Michelangelo. During this important scientific process, known as migration, a person described in local stone tablets as an admirer, lopped off some of Galileo's spare body parts in case there was a market for them on e-Bay. In case it comes up, I’d rather my admirers just send a nice card.

However, since Galileo died before inventing e-Bay, which is really more like something another old guy named Da Vinci would come up with anyway, the random body bits got tucked away in the junk drawer in the kitchen or the box of Christmas decorations in the attic or in a spare teenager’s room, where they wouldn’t be found for many years.

Luckily for us, we live in a generation where we’ve discovered things of our own, like how bad it is to use water bottles more than once and that the decomposed body bits of our friend Galileo were hidden secretly in a box with a big statue of him on the top. Unfortunately this discovery came along too late for me to write a report and save my science grade, but maybe they’ll do somebody some good.

I don’t think Galileo will be using them any time soon.