To the makers of Happy Meal toys

Do you know what puts the “happy” in a “happy” meal…. the dang toy. Are you people on drugs? Can we chat for a minute?

These are supposed to be “HAPPY” meals. Not “CREEPY” meals. If children open up their little paper bags and pull out their prize only to yell “What the hell is this?” there is probably something wrong.

Problem #1… Wizard of Oz. A story which, I admit, I have a hard time figuring out. I’m sure it has its charms. But, think about it… a young girl and her dog, travelling alone in a strange land, killing witches, befriending the likes of a living scarecrow with no brain… it’s all just wrong. What ever possessed you to think kids would come clamouring to collect the entire series of characters from a story most of them probably haven’t seen and some parents wouldn’t let them watch?

Problem #2 – “Madame Alexander” dolls. First, her name sounds like a prostitute. So let’s slap that on a kid’s toy, shall we? Second, dolls which do nothing but have those blinky eyes are just freaking creepy. It doesn’t matter if you put her in a pink skirt and call her “Glinda the Good Witch”… she’s still freaking creepy! Exhibit A:

“Doesn’t she look fun?! Look, honey! A doll with bad hair and little blinky eyes! You lucky girl!”

Oh dear G*d… do you know what I just realized??? Do you see the resemblance?

That’s Gilda on the left, and me as a child on the right. Same hair (particularly the bangs). We both have eyes that blink….

C-R-E-E-P-Y!!!

I know I’m going to have trouble sleeping after this.

More thoughts on driving through life

I have not posted in a couple of days as my head is apparently having a sinus party that goes all day and all night. Of course, I have a paper to write for next week, so I feel like crap. I would describe my illness to you here in great detail, but am not prone to writing horror. Why is it that I am never sick when I have no deadlines, and always, it seems, when time is of the essence?

Anyway… I’ve not been languishing around with an empty mind to go with my full sinuses. I’ve been pondering again. Now that typically means either I am deciding again that my life is not where I want it to be, or I’ve gone off on another irrelavent rant about something. In this case it is the former. Remember when I pondered being a passenger in one’s own life, and thought maybe one needed at least a little bit of that? I’ve been thinking about that lately, and I am not at all happy with the current state of things in the life of Sock. I’m a passenger. Without a destination. Or a map. Since life took a tiny detour from self-employment, I have no clue what I want to be doing (though fairly clear impressions of what I don’t want to be doing), no clue how I plan to get there, or what I want to see on the way. I am reminded of that Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland:

“… thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way
I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where –” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“– so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Do you think it’s odd that I take some comfort in that? That if I only walk long enough I’ll get somewhere eventually?

I’ve also been wondering if my issue is the fact that I have no map… or that I live in a place with so few roads.

If only one could type “Sock Girl’s Life” into Mapquest and get directions.

For now, it’s a matter of staying on cruise control and just watching for signs. Perhaps with some more sleep, and a few more days of antibiotics both my sinuses and the view from the windshield will become clearer. I live in hope.

10 Incontrovertible Truths

I’m woefully behind in posting my list of truths, but the idea was lovingly borrowed from Alto2. It has taken me quite a while to come up with a list! Nonetheless, here it is…

1. You will be most inspired to write/create when you have the least time to do so.

2. There is no real male equivalent to “the granny pantie.” Despite the fact that I’m sure males of past generations probably wore ugly underwear just as often as the women, there does not seem to be a contemporary equivalent of undergarments held in low esteem.

3. The same children who cannot be awakened on a school day will rise on their own at dawn if it is a school holiday.

4. The drive-thru line takes at least 5 minutes longer than you actually have.

5. Drive-thru service will never tell you your order will be delayed until they have your money and you are at the pick up window.

6. The chance of getting a run in your stockings increases with the importance of people at the meeting you will attend wearing those stockings.

7. Similarly, “good hair days” invariably occur on days when you have no place to go and no people to see.

8. The course you enroll in believing it will be easy will actually be your undoing. (Yes, I have yet another Spanish test tonight)

9. There is no Trash Fairy. If a bag of garbage is left on the deck, no fairy will arrive to carry it across the yard to the trash can. (Please feel free to inform my family of this particular truth.)

10. Thinking of 10 incontrovertible truths is really hard!

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Let Sleeping Wives Lie

So I stay home from work yesterday with this sinus-pressure-exploding-head thing that seems to be on the go. I start off my day as usual, doing the mommy thing… packing lunches, nagging about hygiene, checking kitbags, and sending the girls off to school. Then as soon as Rainbow and Dolittle are out the door, back to bed I went.

And at 10:30am Husband comes, wakes me, and asks…

…”What time do you want me to wake you up?”

Who does that? Who wakes up their sick wife to ask when to wake them up? OK… let me rephrase that… What grown-up does that?

Or better yet… What grown-up who does not wish to come to personal harm does that? Because if you approach a sleeping sick wife to ask such a thing, she might not be the only one in the house who will end up needing a doctor. I’m just saying.

Bathtime Yo

If you put your almost-seven-year old in the bathtub with a light-up rubber duck and some bubbles, make sure you pee first because it’s going to be 3 long hours before you get bathroom time again…

Besides contemplating the great mysteries of bubbles (as apparently there are many), and expressing the desire to be a fish, Rainbow also used bath time to excercise her creativity in an impromptu beatbox tune that went something like this…

I’m a daredevil duck Yo (ptptptptpt)

Daredevil duck Yo (ptptptptpt)

Call Me Yo (ptptptptpt)

Cuz I’m Daredevil Duck Yo (ptptptpt)

Call me…

Call me over…

I’m Daredevil Duck Yo (ptptptpt)

Party all the time…

Give me a call Yo…

I’m a cool DJ Yo (ptptptptpt)

(etc.)

I get that there might be some cultural influence for the beatbox thing with Blake on American Idol… but where does someone who watches the likes of Curious George and can spend hours contemplating bubbles pick up phrases like “party all the time…; give me a call, yo…”?

I think we may have to keep a closer eye on the grade one crowd here in the ‘hood. I’m just saying…

Shivering

Now yes… I did know we would need oil soon. But no… I did not go down to the basement to check. It’s icky down there. Damp, and clay, and cold, and dark. And, as fates would have it, at some point in the wee hours of the morning we ran out of oil. Again. I know this because I was woken by Husband shivering and tossing and shivering and tossing. The sound of the furnace hummm was not to be heard. The sound of Husband grumbling to himself was quite distinctive.

So, I got up (as clearly I wasn’t going to be able to sleep with all the tossing and shivering), vainly tapped the thermostat knowing it was fruitless, put more blankets on the girls, dug out the little microheater and turned on the kitchen electric heater, cursed the fact I didn’t have an extension cord to reach the living room, put on a sweater, and went back to bed. We do have another electric heater, but it blows fuses so we can’t use it. The only room we seem to be able to run one in situations like these is the kitchen, at the opposite end of the house to the living room.

Interestingly, we are finding that shivering is good for creativity. So far this morning we’ve come up with ideas for inventions that will chime when the oil tank is getting low, heaters for toilet seats, and a miriad of other ideas to warm bits from the toes to the nose.

So, while the day is off to a flying start, at least the brain is ticking. Now if I could think of an invention to get those kids out of those snug beds. Yep. This will be fun.

Recharging Optimism

It has been hard not to be discouraged about the lack of job prospects here. About the lack of permanence. About the fact that I have actually fallen drastically behind my chosen path in the last few years and am now not even on the same road. Well — if truth be told — I am on the same road I was almost two decades ago. Starting over. It’s discouraging.

My moto this year was supposed to be “REACH.” But what if there is nothing to reach for? And, with no hope in sight… no pending interviews… no prospects of permanence or advancement, or even a position which exercises my brain in a way which would keep me engaged… I feel like having myself a teeny pity party, though that would be a colossal waste of energy. I need to pick up my spirits and keep plowing through.

Today was Dolittle’s spring concert at school. It had the theme “Possibilities.” They talked and sang about the futures ahead of them, their dreams, the potential. I want that so much for my children. I want that for me too.

I think I need to sit down and visualize… Maybe collage or journal or even doodle where I would love to be in a perfect world… Perhaps if I make myself a visual reminder it will reawaken the hopes.

So where do you turn to recharge your optimism and your dreams? What do you do to feel centred when things seem off-kilter?

Pennies from Heaven

According to (this story), apparently G*d writes cheques now… big ones…

Now obviously that’s just fame (infamy?) waiting to happen. If such a cheque were real, that would be newsworthy… and if such a cheque weren’t real and you were dumb enough to believe that a bank would actually cash it, that would likely be reported as well. It’s sort of a win-win thing for attention seekers.

But imagine, for a moment that G*d did send an angel to shake up your world with some money in your mailbox… Would He just slip it in a birthday card? Would He disguise it in an email about some foreign fortune in exchange for your banking information? Or would he suggest that you might already be a millionaire (if you send back the code, consider purchasing some magazines, and put all the stickers in the right places)….

I wonder if direct deposit would ever be an option?

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