Some New Years Musings….

The other day I was driving down the street and I passed a smoking jogger.  Not a jogger that was smoldering, but rather a person, jogging, wearing running clothes and what appeared to be very expensive running shoes who was actively smoking a cigarette.  I don’t even know what to say to that, but I do see the irony.  I don’t know whether to applaud that person or condemn them for the inability to just say “Bleep it” and hitchhike home.

Speaking of irony.  I was driving around town yesterday in an older neighborhood I’d never been in before.  When I say “older” that is not meant to imply that it was one of the historical neighborhoods by any means.  In this neighborhood, there was a trailer park named Noblesse Oblige.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “Noblesse oblige” is generally used to imply that with wealth, power and prestige come responsibilities.  In a trailer park.  Although with a name like that I’m sure they would rather be called A Manufactured Home Neighborhood, but don’t be mistaken.  It was a trailer park.  As they say, you can polish a turd all you want, but in the end all you have is a shiny turd.

The Bandit has a new “thing”.  It is a weird behavior that started out very amusing, then spiraled into extremely annoying, and is now emerging on the other side as funny again.  His father and I have started to imitate it to each other and the other day I even tried it out at work.  Anytime you ask him to do anything, absolutely anything, his response is to say, “Never!”  It’s not the word that’s so funny, it’s the way he says it.  “Nnnnnev-AAAAAAAAH” with all the accent on the second syllable.  Sometimes there is a hand gesture that is very reminiscent of the court room scene in And Justice for All with Al Pacino.  The kid is odd.

Yesterday I was trying to get him dressed.  It was taking forever and I was sweating and exhausted by the end of it.  But I was also laughing.  I managed to get him into his Transformer underwear but the pants were another thing entirely.  At one point he put up his dukes, and said (God strike me down if I’m lying – the god that created action movies) he said, “You wanna piece of me?”  All thirty-five pounds of him terrifies me.

I remember as a child my mother owned a pair of scissors that we were not allowed to touch under penalty of death.  They were her sewing scissors and she didn’t want them tainted by paper.  I always thought it was annoying, but now that I’m a mom, too, I finally get it.  I can’t find scissors in this house to save my life.   If, say a giant, mutant squid were to come out of the bathroom drain, wrap its slimy tentacles around my arm and start to pull me into the drain with it, I’d have to go because there would be no scissors to free myself.  I guess we’d have bigger problems if that was to actually happen, but you understand my use of the metaphor, don’t you?

Pre-children, there were several pairs in the kitchen: the good Henkels ones and the utility ones for cutting flower stems, etc.  There was another pair in the wrapping paper box.  A set was in each desk and another in a drawer by the front door.  There was a small pair in my needle work box, some in the bathroom, and I seem to recall another pair in the drawer next to my bed.  Anytime I needed scissors, there they were.  Now there are no scissors.  As sort of a joke, Santa put some in My Honey’s Christmas stocking.  They barely emerged from the stocking when they vanished into thin air.  There is a dimension somewhere out there in space where all the scissors are floating around.  They have good company with the missing socks, the stuff you buy at the grocery store that never makes it in the bags home with you, and the postage stamps that you know you had last week.

I’ve also decided that besides being a Ninja when I grow up, I’m also going to be a curmudgeon.  I like the way it sounds.  Try it for yourself.  Say it outloud.  Let it roll around on your tongue.  Besides, it’s a way of life I think I could really  be enthusiastic about.  Some definitions say the it is usually an old man, but I think I can trail blaze the way for women.  I plan to bust through the glass ceiling where Nag leaves off and fill the void that has been sorely lacking in female curmudgeonness.  Who’s with me?