the_Old_Woman_in_a_Shoe's blog

Men think they are tougher than women because they lead expeditions to the North Pole and climb Kilamanjaro and jazz like that.  I scoff at such paltry, wussy “feats of endurance.” When the most grueling tests of human stamina are required, men chicken out and vamoose. I’m not talking about jumping cars over ravines. I’m not talking about anything having to do with search-and-rescue, monster trucks, or ultimate fighting. I’m talking about superhuman, godlike fortitude.  When school is cancelled for weeks on end because of snow in the winter, men do not get trapped in their houses with their children.  They shovel out, chip out, dig out and get the lead out.

MY MISSION:  FILL TWO SHOE BOXES

My church participates in Operation Christmas Child.  We fill shoe boxes with toys for children in the developing world.  This year I decided to fill one shoe box for a boy aged 2-4 and one for a girl aged 5-9.  On Sunday, after the special service praying over and blessing the shoe boxes of non-procrastinating participants, I figured I could fill my shoe boxes and get them to the church on Monday morning, muttering a prayer of blessing over them myself.  Since my children and I were already in Wal-Mart on Sunday, I thought grabbing shoe-box fillin's would be no problem.

Was. Not. Going. To. Happen.

My children, you see, believe that they are the most deprived children in the world, and will not let me shop for anybody else's children.  Or for myself.  Or for much of anything except electronic games the size of postage stamps which cost $40 and get lost the same day.  My fourteen-year-old daughter had just watched several episodes of MTV Teen Cribs and decided that anybody who doesn't live in a $20 million house that looks like a resort hotel is underprivileged.

So while I was looking at little cars for my Christmas Child, Boy (2-4), my children were shoving everything from Lego Sets to fuzzy lamps under my nose and begging for them at top volume.  I bought one blue car, under duress ("I bet you never bought ME a blue car that nice when I was a baby!")  And gave up.

On Monday morning, an hour and a half into my Operation Christmas Child shopping trip, I realized I am way too anal-retentive to shop for tiny strangers in foreign lands, even if my children are in school and out of the way. 

CHRISTMAS CHILD, MALE, AGED 2-4

My little Operation Christmas Child boy will be 2-4 years old.  That's quite an age range.  Would he be two and put the toys in his mouth?  Would they pose a choking hazard?  Would he be four and think stacking cups were stupid?  Would he eat the crayons?  Stick the pencils in his eyes?  Would he be African and need a different kind of brush or comb?  What if the soap stung his eyes?  Liquid baby soaps were prohibited, so I got him:

• Soft chewable Tonka car with moveable non-detatchable wheels labelled safe for children over 20 months
• Aveeno oatmeal soap (won't sting)
• Nice washcloth (the cheap one looked like it might unravel)
• 3-pack of Hanes T-shirts, sized 2-4T (big enough?)
• Candy (what if he's starving?  Wouldn't a baggie of pinto beans make more sense than candy?  If all the other kids' boxes have candy his day will be ruined though.  Candy.)
• Stackable cups (technically a baby toy; if he's four, he can eat and drink out of 'em)
• Four-pack of Colgate Wisp toothbrushes with built-in dentifrice (least confusing/messy/edible)
• Stuffed salamander with no parts to chew off (too scary?)
• Stuffed dog (ditto, but ears somewhat worrisome)
• Wooden number/letter blocks (crap, made in China, but small enough to fit in box but too big for mouth)
• Large rubber ball (couldn't find one, got one for a dog, smelled highly toxic, wouldn't even give it to a dog, got smaller one out of bubblegum machine)

One shoe box down, one to go.

CHRISTMAS CHILD, FEMALE, AGED 5-9

My little Operation Christmas Child girl will be 5-9 years old.  Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

I almost got her a pink fleece blanket with stars but the shoe box was too small.  Will she be cold at night with no blanket?  Why doesn't the dollar store have a mosquito net?  That might fit in the box.  What good are school supplies if she's dead of malaria in a month? 

Here is what I stuffed in her box:

• Twist-up Crayola Crayons (the normal kind might break)
• Writing tablet
• Sharpened pencils and a sharpener (pre-sharpened them because sharpener might not work)
• Yardley of London lavender soap (kid needs a little luxury, yes?)
• Bright, shiny, funky head scarf (okay, so this was a splurge.  Hope her mother/big sister doesn't swipe and/or sell it)
• Purple washcloth (matches the soap)
• Pink travel toothbrush and Colgate (to where, on earth, do I think she is travelling?  oh well, it looked cool)
• Set of bright bracelets with stars
• Two dolls, one small clown with a china face and one big soft cloth one.  No plastic.
• About 200 itsy-bitsy ponytail holders, suitable for any little girl of any race
• Hairbrush
• "Worry dolls" in a wooden box from Chinaberry in Charlottesville (happened to have some on hand; will Samaritan's Purse think they are idolatrous voodoo gear and throw them away? I hope not.)
• Large rubber ball from same bubblegum machine
• Even more candy than the little boy got

After all, little girls in the developing world have a lot of catching up to do.

So into my church fellowship hall I skulk, at the very last possible shoe-box second, and lay the boxes on a table with the $14 check, $7 per box.  God, bless these belated overstuffed shoe boxes that I've fretted over for two hours, and may they bless some little kids somewhere on earth and make their Christmas very happy, and do not permit the kids' parents to auction off the contents since I spent so much money, and protect the kids from bullies who would take their Werther's Original butter candy and luxury soaps by force, and help me to get a grip already, amen.

I just finished last year's "green" bestseller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman, and I gotta tell you, I'm not optimistic about preventing this planet from beoming a seething oven by 2050.  My grandkids are gonna need an awful lot of sunscreen, and probably filtration masks. 

Short of someone miraculously inventing flying trees, which--running on nothing but water vapor--convert carbon dioxide into oxygen faster than we can pump it into the atmosphere, the planet is screwed.  By my calculations, to offset current CO2 emissions we would need about 100 billion of these flying trees, we need them five years ago, and they need to convert CO2 into oxygen a whole lot faster than ordinary trees.  Even if the technology existed, which it doesn't, what company can be trusted to build 100 billion flying trees?  What country can be trusted to launch them?

I vote that we not let Microsoft build the 100 billion flying trees, because Flying Tree 2.0 would crash into someone's house or head unless it's updated about every fifteen minutes.  We'd have flying trees sending this message back to Earth:  "Update me now or I'll shut down.  Update me now or I'll shut down.  Update now?  Huh? Huh?  How about now?  Tough noogies, I need to shut down anyway.  Shut down now?  Okay, how about now?  Look, I'm out of patience with your desire to get some work done instead of restarting me.  Restarting in five, four, three, two, one. . ."

Not pretty.

We should probably not elect Wal-Mart to build 100 billion flying trees because their flying trees would import thousands of metric tons of cheap imports from Asia when nobody is looking.

McDonald's cannot build the flying trees either, because they would bear McFakefruit that is 99% high fructose corn syrup, and this would result in very obese birds and flying squirrels on a crash course with extinction.

And finally, the Disney Corporation is the worst choice of all to build the flying trees, because their flying trees would blast the Jonas Brothers and Mylie Cyrus and "It's A Small World" and drive everybody over the age of 12 stark raving insane.

So leave the free market out of the equation.  Oh, I know!  Let the government build the flying trees!

What a wonderful idea.  We'll borrow from China to build 100 billion flying trees.  Let's hope they don't cost much more than the hot-air balloon from Melbourne, Australia, pictured above right.

Russia, Iraq, and North Korea (not to mention China) will be so pleased to see CO2-converting flying trees from America in their airspace, you just can't imagine.  They will take off their hats and their eyes will fill with tears of gratitude that the good old USA is saving the planet.  And if North Korea built the flying trees, we would do the same.

It will not occur to anybody, including Al Quaeda, that the flying trees could be weapons, or could be made into weapons running on water vapor.  Nobody will shoot the trees down, take them apart, and copy the technology for nefarious ends.  Of course they won't.  Because nobody believes that Jesus or Mohammed is going to bail them out anyway before things get too bad, that natural disasters are a sign of impending paradise, and that the immediate, much less long-term, fate of the planet does not matter. 

Mmm-hmm.

This scenario, of course, leaves out the fact that we are losing millions of trees every day that didn't cost anybody a cent.  Even if we put 100 billion flying trees in the air, indigenous third-world peoples would, at best, stop clear-cutting the tropical rainforest long enough to worship the flying trees, then go back to destroying species with blithe abandon because their kids won't be eating next week unless they cut trees down.  The fact that my grandchildren may look back sadly at extinct orangutans does not matter quite as much to the rainforest tribal folks as the fact that their children are starving right this minute.  I can understand that.

Here lies the problem with Friedman's entire thesis, which is that his whole "green revolution" rests on the miraculous discovery of "cheap, clean, reliable electrons" that can be mass-produced and which people can be educated not to abuse, whether innocently out of dire need, or malevolently for the heck of it.   I'll address the last half of this thesis first, then go back and address the cheap electrons thing.  In considering the propensity of some people to abuse whatever they get their mitts on,  I'm having a flashback to Political Science 101, in which the prof put to my class these three provocative questions:

• Who rules?
• To what end?
• What about the 5 percent of people who are just plain dog-kickin', cat-skinnin' bad?

Those five percent get their hands on cheap clean energy, and they will do so much damage, so fast, that global warming looks benign by comparison. 

Now about the electrons: human beings in the entire course of history have not managed to mass-produce cheap, clean, reliable anything.  Nothing can be produced without waste.  Nothing can be produced without cost.  The mere fact that Friedman is talking about electrons makes it seem more scientific and therefore less ludicrous, but put anything else into Freidman's mantra and it looks like sheer fantasy:

We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable patio furniture.  The government can m ake it happen.
We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable post-it notes.  The government can make it happen.
We need a bountiful source of cheap, clean, reliable lawyers.  The government can make it happen.

People like to consume.  I like to consume.  This is why, on the first day of Economics 101, my prof wrote SCARCITY in giant letters across the entire length of the blackboard.  That is the first principle of economics.  There is not, and there never will be, enough of anything to satisfy all human wants and needs.  Energy included.  The limitless human hunger for energy has already irreversibly damaged the natural world, and the damage will continue apace. 

I am praying that nobody, and I mean nobody, figures out cold fusion or any other perfect, cheaper-than-dirt, non-polluting, limitless source of energy.  It will lead to one of two things:

• War in the name of war, as making weapons becomes easier and cheaper than ever and people kill each other just because;
• War in the name of peace, as the good guys try to figure out who the bad guys are and how to keep free cheap energy out of their hands by killing them whenever and wherever they acquire it.

We cannot trust in 50% conservation and 50% miracles.  The really scary facts about the environment are these:

• Conservation is the only solution; any new technology is too slow.
• Even if all human beings had the will to conserve as much energy as possible from this point forward, the effort would still fall short of what is necessary to avert disastrous climate change in my lifetime.

Now who wants cheesecake?  Chilled, not baked. Yes, it's evil, wasteful corporate food, but I need comfort from someplace. How 'bout if I recycle the box?

I am a driver who is perpetually lost.  I get lost going places I've been to dozens of times; to wit:  last month I got lost en route to my university, from which I drove home on the weekends for four years.

People say, "You know how to get here, right?"

Sheepish silence.

"Well, you've been here, right?"

More sheepish silence.

"Shoedame, you were just here last weekend!"  And they throw up their hands and start talking about landmarks.  Well, do you know where the 50-foot grain silo is?  With the robin's-egg-blue top?  Teenagers spray-painted profane graffiti on it in bright red paint."

No response.

In my defense, if their vehicles were full of my children they wouldn't notice landmarks either.  The Statue of Liberty could be relocated to their neighborhood and they would drive right by without noticing it.  The atmosphere in my minivan is. . .is. . .well, it's like this.  Interruptions are bracketed:

"MOM!  She has my hairbrush in her "[bag MOM!]" will you make them shut "[up I]" don't want to go to the pool, it's "[boring SHE]" still has my hairbrush, make her give it to "[me GET]" your thumb out of your mouth you stupid "[baby YELLOW]" punch buggy no punch "[back! OW!]" MOM! he hit "[me YOU]" said my boyfriend could come over can he come over "[tonight, SHE]" always has people over and I never have anybody over, I've been asking to have Kaitlyn over for a "[month WHY]" do we have to have all these dumb girls over, I want to have boys "[over I'M]" starving can we stop for soda?  Ice cream? "[Chips? I]" wanna make love in this club, in this club, in this clu. . .<click> MOM! why did you turn off the radio?"

Combine this level of distraction with my natural (nonexistent) sense of direction, and you have a family that is rarely where, or when, we are supposed to be.  We've gotten lost in every city, town, and outpost within 200 miles.  For years, I have been allowing an extra 45 minutes to get pretty much anywhere.  I consider this the minimum "getting lost time".  If Columbus had sailed the ocean blue with these five kids he'd have ended up in the Arctic circle.  We'd all be eating whale blubber right now.

So naturally, I've envied people with a GPS device to help them drive where they're supposed to be going.

That is, I envied them until I borrowed these devices and tried to use them.  You might think that with the noise level in my minivan, I wouldn't even be able to hear a GPS, but I actually can.  I can hold a GPS in my lap and turn it up to so many decibels that the polite, firm, schoolteacherish voice is louder than five kids and the radio.  So that's not a difficulty.  However, any GPS is a) hell bent on killing us all or b) gets us even more lost, if possible, than my sorry sense of direction.

I've concluded that the difference between having a GPS and not having one is that you get lost strangling a computer, or get lost not strangling a computer.

My mother's GPS directs me to turn into brick walls, cow pastures, and creeks with amazing accuracy.  It also proclaims that "you are now arriving at your destination" when nowhere within ten miles of the place.  "Turn left," it says.  "You are now arriving at your destination."  You look to the left at a ten-foot pile of mulch and ungraciously lose your temper.  Her GPS takes you to the correct street in a city and then demurs at directing you to the actual street number, which might be 25 blocks away.  Maybe Mom's GPS thinks that would be cheating; making it a little too easy for me.  Famously, Mom's GPS once announced that I had arrived to pick my son up from a college class at the Zippy Clean Car Wash. 

My boyfriend's GPS sounds like Mary Tyler Moore on crystal meth and is also possessed by the devil, or at least one of hell's lower-ranking imps.  It exclaims, in the middle of four-lane highways without so much as a shoulder, "turn right, then turn left.  Recalculating." He calls his GPS by a name I can't repeat and says, "You'd better recalculate, because I can't turn right or left."  His GPS is also confounded by exit and entrance ramps.  Get on a ramp and it freaks completely and the whole system resets.  These are ramps that the GPS actually picks out and directs him onto, and then thinks better of it.

My uncle Bob tells a story of being sent up a mountain road by his homicidal GPS which, due to a rock slide, had only one lane.  He was nearly run off the mountainside by a school bus and sought refuge in a ditch.  When he arrived, traumatized, at his destination, the townspeople asked, "you took the mountain road, didn't you?"  They could tell by looking at him.  "Don't ever," the locals intoned, with wagging heads, "take that road."

Computers, even satellite-directed ones, think drivers should take horrible, even potentially deadly, routes.  We poor human suckers are so used to believing whatever computers say that we might abandon paved roads for dirt roads, or cow paths through the woods, if computerized voices told us to.  Uncle Bob's harrowing journey reminds me of people who show up here on the front porch of the Shoe all sweaty and bedraggled and a lovely shade of "MapQuest Green"—their computers directed them to get here from the south by going over Mount Rogers—Virginia's highest elevation, 5,729 feet. This route shaves 20 miles off their journey and adds an hour and a half, the poor things.  In addition to the folly of Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps, our visitors' brand new, very expensive GPS systems often have no sense of road quality versus mileage, and bring them crawling at 20 mph over fifteen miles of unrelenting hairpin curves. Some turkey hunters arrived here by this method and were too exhausted to aim at turkey one; they pleaded to be directed to the nearest hotel and looked relieved when I pointed in the opposite direction of Mt. Rogers.

I'm not saying I've never gotten anywhere using a GPS.  Once, Mom's GPS directed me without a single mishap to the nearest Golden Corral—where I could have an excellent salad and a sliver of steak and admire the 400-lb diners for a mere $15, counting tax and tip, and do the cha-cha in the double-wide bathroom stall.  However, my bad experiences driving with a GPS far outnumber the good.  I have elected not to ask for a GPS for Christmas.  By gum, á la Frank Sinatra, I'll be lost, but much more than this, I'll be lost my way.
 

My laundry pile was just proclaimed "Virginia's 27th Highest Peak" by Governor Kaine.  A stack of dirty clothes and linens so high, I should climb to the top and yodel.

I'm no mathematician, but shouldn't there be less laundry in the summertime, with the children wearing only shorts, tank tops, and sandals?  God help me, our dirty laundry is everywhere.

There's laundry in the bathrooms, in the bedrooms, and behind the living room door.  There's laundry under the sofa and on the front porch and on the back porch. There's laundry in the yard (because of kids stripping off clothes worn over bathing suits to play with the garden hose) and laundry in the van (muddy jackets and blankets from rainy baseball games).

Everything gets dirtier in the summer, and gets dirtier more often.  And not just the clothing, either.  The linens dirtied in summer in this house would try the patience of a saint.  Every hankie and 35 wash cloths are soiled once the paper towels are gone (daily, by noon), and then my resourceful rugrats raid the kitchen drawers for dishrags and cloth napkins.  Don't even get me started on towels--for swimming, for baths and showers, for mopping up spills, for sunbathing.  The children's bedsheets are revolting in warm weather all the time.  Bedding reeks even if I just washed it two days ago.

Even gathering up all the laundry in and around the Shoe is exhausting.  The resulting smelly heap is depressing.  No one woman can possibly wash, dry, fold, and put away this much laundry.  I want to go back to Great-Grandma's two-pairs-of-overalls method, or sign up for Nudism.

Oddly enough, whether I do two, four, or six loads of laundry a day, nobody in this house has any clean underwear during summer break.  Ever.  The underwear situation was the same last summer, so I think terrorists are kidnapping our underwear as soon as school lets out and returning it in August. I'd alert Homeland Security and get them on the case, only no underwear means a tenth of a load a day that I don't have to wash.  I don't mean to sound alarmist, but Laundrageddon is approaching. 

I am spending more on detergent, Oxyclean, Stain Sticks and dryer sheets than I am spending on meat and milk.  Today, June 27, 2009, the laundry pile has reached such a staggering, sticky, stinky height that I really ought to glue it together--unless there's enough mucus and popsicle drippings and watermelon juice to hold it together already--and make a sculpture to donate to a modern art museum.  I would call my masterpiece "Warning:  Fruits of Reproduction." 

Looking at Mt. Laundry, I feel like the last tzar of Russia when the guys with red flags showed up.  I feel like the dude in mythology whose guts got eaten by birds every day and then grew back every night so the birds could eat them again.  Basically, I feel kinda bummed out.  On days like this I walk into the laundry room and think, Oxyclean?  What I need is Oxycontin.

If I were filthy stinking rich, I would simply move out of my houseful of laundry and go buy everyone new wardrobes.  In summertime, I'd change addresses every other week. I'd pay the realtor or somebody to haul the laundry all off to Goodwill:  clean-but-unfolded laundry, dirty unsorted laundry, dirty sorted laundry, wet laundry moldering in the washer, and dry laundry wrinkling in the dryer. Then I would realize that I just donated several sports uniforms to Goodwill which the kids need for games, oh, like, say, tomorrow.

The kids would not be happy.

But their mother, wandering through my new house which is, for a few blissful hours, totally empty of textiles at every stage of the laundry process?  I would be ecstatic.

Then my son would look outside and say, "Hey!  Look!  A hose!" And his little sister would say, "Just a minute; I'm gonna grab a popsicle."
 

I have a 14-year old daughter, size 6, who is convinced she is still a size 2.  This is nothing unusual.  This country is full of women in denial about their actual pants size, who routinely starve and stuff themselves into their former size—pre-pregnancy, pre-Thanksgiving, pre-audition for the lead in the remake of "The Blob."

I could, of course, buy her blue jeans and cut out the labels.  Sometimes I do.

This is not a problem.

However, she has a 12-year-old sister who actually is a size 2.

This, friends, is a problem.

The problem comes in when it is time to hand down clothes from one sibling to another, a must in the cash-strapped Shoe and never a problem with my sons.  Big Bro would toss a shirt at Lil' Bro with a manly air, as if, overnight, he had morphed into Vin Diesel or the Rock, and say in a deep voice, "I have outgrown this.  He can have it."  In fact, I could transfer an outgrown shirt or pair of pants from one boy's drawer into another and the boys, nine times out of ten, never even noticed.

However, here's a newsflash:  girls are different.  Big Sis would die 10,000 painful deaths before admitting that she has gone up a jeans size (or two) and needs to hand down jeans to Lil' Sis.  She might be induced to hand down jeans that are too long, but not a pair that is (gasp!) too tight in the backside.  Most of the time, she even keeps the too-long jeans.  She simply rolls them up to below the knees and continues to squeeze into them, using power tools if necessary.

If I make a mistake and put all of the size 2 jeans in Lil' Sis's drawer, including the old ones that Big Sis is still squeezing into, all hell breaks loose when Lil' Sis, innocently or not, puts her big sister's old jeans on.

And they think they have hostilities in the Gaza Strip.

Once, Big Sis tried to pull her old jeans off her sister by force, with Lil' Sis kicking and screaming, and nearly succeeded.  The fact of her near success getting them off her little sister should have clued in Big Sis that THEY DO NOT FIT HER, seeing as she must put them on by lying on the floor and rolling them on, while holding her breath, and get them off by the same method in reverse, as if peeling a banana.

One morning, I was drinking my coffee when Lil' Sis came tearing into the room screaming bloody murder with Big Sis in hot pursuit.  "SHE HAS ON MY AEROPOSTALES!" Big Sis bellowed.  I jumped between them, but Lil' Sis escaped and shook her behind saucily.  "See, Mom, they fit me," she gloated, and jumped behind me again as Big Sis tried to grab her by the face, barely missing.  Big Sis's pupils turned red and steam came out of her ears.

The jeans did fit Lil' Sis--they were the same size as her new brand new ones, in fact.  But that was not the point.  The point was that Big Sis's ego was on the line and that Lil' Sis would not survive to get on the school bus in Big Sis's old jeans.

"Give them to her!  They're hers!"

"But Mooooooooom, they fit me!  They don't fit her any more, she's too big."

I intercept Big Sis's fist in mid-air.  "Get 'em off," I repeat.

"But none of mine are cleeeeeean!" Lil' Sis whines.

"Then wear your capris.  One more word and I take your cell phone.  And your snack money."

That usually puts the kibosh on the fight, at least until the "She's wearing MY scrunchie!" (or hair clip, barrette, ponytail holder, hairband, etc.) dispute breaks out, with said scrunchie yanked from offending head, along with some of the offender's hair, causing a scratching-and-slapping war so brutal that I end up confiscating two cell phones, a Nintendo DS, and a digital camera.

I know they don't take this crap after their mother. Of course, I will buy only size 8 jeans new, because they will stretch, and size 10 jeans at the Goodwill, because some other woman undoubtedly overshrunk them in the dryer.  No WAY am I a size 10.  I was a size 8 before I had kids, and I'm a size 8 now.  I wouldn't know about the pants Mom gives me, though.

They all have the tags cut out.

The short story "Liking Men," from Margaret Atwood's Simple Murders, begins:  "It's time to start liking men again.  Where shall we begin"?  Atwood finally concludes that the feet of the sleeping man presently in her bed are kinda cute and, all in all, acceptable.  She'll begin, then, by liking his feet.

There is nothing like online dating to make me read Atwood, all Atwood, and nothing but Atwood. The most rabidly feminist man-hating screed in the world is mother's milk to me after just one date with a guy I meet online.  Nothing will sink men in my estimation quicker.  Since I published my Online Dating Dictionary in my blog last year ( http://www.ls.net/node/448 ),some of my girlfriends have suspected that I have online dating horror stories which I've yet to spill.  They want to read about them.  They think they will be amusing.

So.  Here goes.

I highly recommend online dating for extreme masochists who are dissatisfied with lesser forms of torture, like the rack, the keel-haul and the iron maiden.  The greatest mystery surrounding online dating is why, in the face of the huge popularity of these sites, homosexuality is holding steady at 2-5% of the population.  Online dating can make you loathe and mistrust the opposite sex to the point where arthropods begin to look attractive.  Perhaps the sites match up enough gays and lesbians with brain-dead losers, pervs and wackos that they also give up on the same sex, causing statistical parity? 

I'm not saying online dating never works for anyone.  The founder of eharmony.com, for instance, is filthy stinking rich.  I'm saying my experiences with men-met-online qualified me for federal disaster relief.

There Was Ben.

I found Ben on match.com.  A handsome chiropractor, Ben chatted me up for a while, proclaiming me "the nicest woman he'd ever talked to."  He talked about driving to meet me but never, technically, pointed his vehicle in my general direction.  He said he wanted to take his time and date around, as he was very recently divorced.  I agreed with him that going on the rebound was unhealthy, and accepted this as the reason why he never seemed to show up in person.  A month later he sent me his wedding photos via email.

And Also Marty.

Marty was a policeman.  He commanded his own S.W.A.T. team, which could be a big plus if my ex ever resumed his old stalking habit.  I was really psyched about Marty, because he was both sweet and smart--both very rare qualities on. . .which dating site was this?. . .Yahoo! Singles, I think.  We spent untold hours chatting via Yahoo! Messenger while I looked at the imposing photo of him in the upper left hand chat box corner.  Sunglasses, huge forearms folded in front of him, curly black hair--a very compact, smokin' hot presence.  Like something out of the movies.  We planned our first date, at Shoney's.  When I arrived, Marty was bigger than the buffet.  He explained that the photo I had been drooling over every night for a month was taken in 1985.  Since that time he had put on about 200 pounds.  He explained that he did not post a photo taken within the past couple of decades because, quote, "I didn't want to put myself down."

I made the fatal mistake of having my children in the same restaurant at a different table because babysitting fell through.  My 13-year-old son kept looking over at Marty and choking on his food with laughter.  I think at one point he had cole slaw up his sinuses, but when I went over to him, he sipped his water, slapped his thigh repeatedly, and said, chortling through tears, "I'm okay!  I'm okay!  Go talk to the poor guy!"

And Frank.  Step Aside, Clark Gable.

Women who suppose that romance and chivalry are dead have never been out with Frank.  The man oozed charm from every pore.  I met him on a Christian dating site.  Can't remember the name of it.  Frank had two homes, one in the city and one in the mountains.  We lingered over a ridiculously expensive lunch for an hour and a half, during which Frank proved himself a superb conversationalist. Then we walked up and down main street and he stopped at Barr's Fiddle Shop, tuned up a guitar, and sang country love songs like "Remember When."  I thought, this dude needs a recording contract.  As we strolled through the rest of the downtown, he suddenly turned to me and took my hand.  He explained, in the sweetest male tone of voice I've ever heard, that he had narrowed the "candidate pool" for his second wife down to two women, me and a blonde whom he'd been to dinner with the night before, and "I'm sorry, you're great and all, but I think she's a little bit better." 

I Thought Ghengis Khan was Dead

. . .until I went out with Rick.  He also—take special note of this fact—advertised on a Christian dating site, plentyoffish.com.  Unlike with Benny, and Marty, and Frank, Rick and I actually made it to date number two.  I noticed, as I watched his hands on the restaurant table, that Rick had a strange habit of twitching his fingers.  He squirmed convulsively, picked up his coffee cup, put it down, and looked me right in the eye.  He confessed that he had had sex with 300 different women.

In the past year alone.

I looked at him and thought, this guy has venereal diseases that scientists don't even know about yet.  "Waitress!  Check please!"  Can you say plentyofsharks.com?

Not all of my dates generated from online sites have been this interesting.  I've described only the really freaky ones.  Most have been so boring that it was all I could do to remain conscious.  I cherish the memories of dates during which neither me nor the guy could think of a single thing to say.  Not a syllable.  We just stared at each other, helplessly, like mummies in a museum whose tongues have been dust for three millennia. 

Some dates never came off at all, not because the guys married other women like Benny, but because my idea of a first date and that of my "match" were somewhat incompatible.  Like the guy from North Carolina who wanted our first date to be at a weekend nudist retreat.  So now you gals (and guys) know what inspired me to write my Online Dating Dictionary.

If your most hated movie of all time is "Mary Poppins," what does this mean about you as a mother?

Nothing good, I imagine.

I detest that film with every fiber of my being.  I always object to musicals with no decent songs, but this movie manages to sink lower than its music.  The music is supercalifragilistic specially atrocious.  "I love to laugh, yuk yuk yuk yuk. . ."feed the birds, tuppence a bag". . ."Good luck will rub orf when I shakes 'ands with you". . .

The only good songs in "Mary Poppins" are the ones sung by Mr. Banks about how a proper British home should be run (until Mary butts in), and the highly enjoyable one about the "Tuppence, patiently, cautiously trustingly invested in the, to be specific, in the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank!"  Now that's good stuff.  You can get a ringtone on your cell phone about the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, and I'm seriously considering it.  But these are brief ditties, partly spoken rather than sung, because stuffy old unreformed Dad is one of the villains of the picture.  90% of the film is spent on songs that just honestly suck.

And if crappy music weren't bad enough, the overall message of "Mary Poppins" is that Jane and Michael have such rotten parents that they need a magical woman with a flying umbrella to be their substitute parent until their real parents wake up and smell the medicine in a spoonful of sugar.  And Mary certainly put the "loco" in the in loco parentis.

However, the real problem with Jane and Michael is not that they have one parent with a life, because Mary Poppins would probably stay in the sky if their father worked long hours at the bank and their mother stayed in the nursery entertaining them all the time.  Jane and Michael's real problem is that they have a feminist for a mother, and thus, no "real" parents at all.  Crusading feminist mothers are no fun, and kids have a right to fun parents, so Mary Poppins pops in to bring some fun to the dull and neglected lives of these flaxen-haired little darlings.

And what does Mary do first?  She uses her magic, and everything that the kids have strewn all over the house begins dancing around to put itself away.  My kids would love that.  The fun job, Mary teaches, is the job that gets done without any effort from you.  Now if I were Jane and Michael's new nanny, I would show up and say, "Your mother is out demonstrating so that Jane here will not be a second-class citizen.  Now get your girly little pinafores in another gear (you too, Mikey) and pick up this mess and have her some hot cocoa waiting when she gets home.  Double time, now, MOVE MOVE MOVE!"

But Mary spoils the kids rotten, and takes them out on roofs to dance with some very dirty men, with one of whom, Bert, she has some kind of undefined attachment, although one of the lousy songs assures us that:

"You'd never think of pressing
Your advantage
Forbearance is the hallmark
Of your creed
A lady needn't fear
When you are near
Your sweet gentility is crystal clear!"

Uh-huh.  I'll admit most guys who can hoof it like ol' Bert and spend lots of time on sidewalk art give the ladies no cause for alarm, but it ain't because they're so forbearing. Sometimes Mary and Bert's jolly holidays are even animated, lest you miss the fact that these two really, really enjoy each other's company.  All in perfect Disnocence, of course.  All Bert wants is to jump in and out of chalk drawings—nice ones!—with Mary once in a while.  In Bert's defense, his topnotch dancing and art, combined with Mary's first- rate singing skills, probably beats an afternoon at the movies to give the Banks bambinos a little culture.

Bert, Mary, and the kids—our makeshift substitute family unit—also ride merry-go-round animals through parks (maybe a flash-forward of Jane's future career as a pole dancer if her mother is unsuccessful as a suffragette?), when the kids are not floating on the ceiling with Mary's obviously drunk uncle.  Mary also feeds them lots of sugar, especially with their medicine.  Is that on the label?  Are those the pediatrician's dosage recommendations?  Oh well, at any rate, a good, magical time is had by all.

But wait!  That Bert and Mary make much better parents is not supposed to be the point of this movie, otherwise it would be blatantly anti-family, and that just ain't Disney.  After demonstrating her magical superiority as caregiver, Mary is supposed to make peace between children and parents, so that she can consider her mission completed, grab her umbrella and go frolic in the park with Bert and the dancing penguins. 

Instead, Mary cleverly rigs things so that the children will go with Mr. Banks to his bank job (yes, his name is Banks and he works at a bank where he also banks, a real crass capitalist pig of a guy) and, slick old Mary simultaneously manipulates the kiddies so that the outing with daddy will be a complete disaster.  This part of the movie makes no sense to me—some weird thing about a crazy old beggar of a bird woman.  Mary sings that the saints and apostles actually smile on this woman and on all those who give her money for birdseed. In the awful scene that ensues, sound financial advice about compound interest becomes child abuse, London's curse of a pigeon population gets fed, and Mr. Banks gets fired.

Way to go, Mary.  I guess now that Dad is unemployed, the kids can always eat medicine and sugar, or go get full of hot air with your nutcase uncle.
 
If we're having Take the Kids to Work Day, why can't Jane go march with her mother?  It would be much more educational than hanging out on roofs with chimney sweeps. Sending the kids to work with Dad is an acknowledgement that what Dad does with his life is at least marginally important, whereas Mary never makes a single mention of what Mrs. Banks does, as if being a suffragette is something shameful.  Maybe Mary has voting rights already in the animated world, or is simply above such paltry concerns.  Mrs. Banks is clearly, like most leading suffragettes of the time, a brain-dead ditz who has difficulty speaking in complete sentences and whose stock answer to her husband is "whatever you say, dear."

By the end of the movie, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Banks have decided to turn over a new leaf and be more fun, involved parents.  However, Mr. Banks gets his job back but Mrs. Banks repudiates the cause of Votes for Women.  She takes off her suffragette banner and grabs a kite.  Who cares whether Jane ever gets the vote?  You ought to see her fly a kite!  Plus, she's such an attentive mother that she would never dream of nannies, nurseries, or day care! 

Gag me.  Did I mention that the book Mary Poppins, by P. L. Travers, is actually good?  It's genuinely charming, not roll-your-eyes corny.  The classic book 101 Dalmatians is also quite wonderful, and now that story is all about Glen Close slopping through goop in fright wigs.  And in The Swiss Family Robinson the book, the mother works alongside her husband and sons instead of sitting around under a pink parasol.  Let's hear it for Disneyfication.  At least they did justice to Narnia, in the first movie anyhow.

Being "wired" to your friends, neighbors, and even scant acquaintances has its advantages.

For antisocial misanthropes like me, networking on the Internet (my tool of choice is Facebook) keeps me aware that there are, in fact, other people in the world.  Who knew?  In my own neighborhood, even.  People who are related to me, went to high school or college with me, and who, inexplicably, even care about me.

And the more caring we express about each other, the more caring we feel.  Social networking builds friendships.  Keeping up with one another via the tools on the internet overcomes the embarrassment we shy folk might have over, for instance, walking up to a former high school classmate and saying, "Happy Birthday."

Not that we even had a clue when our high school classmates' birthdays were, until Facebook's Birthday Calendar app came along.

It's kind of cool—in fact, it's very cool—to know that a person you liked 20 years ago and still like very much now, is going to Disneyworld, and when she gets back, and whether she had fun.  You can go to her Facebook page and say, "Drive safe!"  "Say 'Hi' to Mickey for me!"  "Glad you're back—how was sunny Florida?"  It makes you feel more a part of your community.  You are reminded that, before you had children and vanished into a giant laundry pile or a workday cubicle, you were a kid, with pals.  You and these pals had fun together. I barely remember these halcyon days, but lately, on Facebook, it's all coming back to me.  I am not just a mom.  I am a person.  I was a girl.  I had a life!

Until Facebook, my homeboys and homegirls and I were all a bunch of zombie chauffeurs, driving our kids to endless sports and saying "Hey, wassup" in the Subway line and at church and in Food City, like ships, or frantic speedboats, passing in the night.

Now we have Facebook, and we're connected.  I know when my best friend when I was 5 years old has the flu.  I know when my best friend when I was 15 years old goes on a trip.  I know when the guy who played guitar in the rock band that I followed around when I was 20 is playing in a bar in Chicago. I know what's up with all of them—the big news, anyhow.  Promotions, divorces, diseases, divorces that are indistinguishable from diseases.  And they know my big news.  Using Facebook's photo albums app, we know what one another's children look like.  Mine are much better looking than any of theirs.

Now some of my chums have gone a step further with the internet networking thing, and have signed up for Twitter.  Twitter enables you to tell all of your friends precisely what you are up to, all the time.  They get updates on you, either via email, or on their mobile phones.

I am not sure I am ready for this.  I am not sure my friends are ready for this.

My "tweets" coming from Twitter might sound more like painful squawks.  Gripes.  Or ugly, private revelations.  The real, straight "dope" on what the Old Woman in the Shoe is up to, hour by hour, is not something anybody really wants to know, do they?

Shoedame is flossing her teeth for the first time in months.
Shoedame is overcome with self-loathing.
Shoedame shoved all the clean laundry under her bed so she wouldn't have to fold it.
Shoedame is facing another bout of chronic constipation.
Shoedame is suspecting that the entire legal system only exists so that rich men can get their Mercedes payments in on time.
Shoedame is buying chocolate which she intends to hide from her children.
Shoedame is evading all of her real-life responsibilities in order to waste an hour on Facebook and delude all of her cyber-friends into thinking she is doing something productive.

My tweeting friends are not posting anything like this.  Their tweets are very intimidating, in fact.  So far, all of my friends who are on Twitter seem to have amazingly productive and pure lives.  Their tweets sound like broadcasts from heaven:

Johnnie is building a house with Habitat for Humanity.
Johnnie is feeling chipper after a great, uplifting concert by Kids Need Food.
Johnnie is planting a tree, because the world needs more trees.
Johnnie is psyched about another workweek.  YEAH!

Not:

Johnnie wishes more than anything his wife would shut up and leave him alone.

Of course, if Johnnie put that in his Twitter update line, he would then need to go to Facebook and change his status from "In a Relationship" to "Single," once the real truth appeared on his wife's mobile phone.

So it turns out that, even in our Twitterpated world, hourly updates on Johnnie may be telling me just as much as the occasional "Hey, what's up?" "Nothin' much" in Subway, while he's just rushing back from taking his son to baseball and I'm in a rush to get my daughter to volleyball.  The truth is, we're both frail human wrecks who are victims of

1) our drive to reproduce;

2) our need to make sure that our kids do all the same things other kids do, all day, every day; and

3) our complete inability to pay for it. 

Plus the simple fact that any people, anytime, anywhere, who try to maintain a long-term relationship or marriage suffer and struggle mightily in the attempt, and miserably fail as often as they succeed.

But we can't post any of that on Twitter every hour, or on Facebook every day.  We can't be that honest, in public, at all.  So we underplay our bad stuff and broadcast our good stuff.  Which is competely healthy and normal. And if all I know is the "big news" on 75 of my favorite people, it's a lot more than what I knew about them two years ago.

And I do hope my homegirl and her crew get to Disneyworld and back okay, and that they have a good time, whatever a "good time" is.  The super thing about being on the same wire is, all the birdies are perched on it together, squawking whatever it is we squawk, good/bad true/false.  But we're all wired together, sending messages of support—life is hard; hang in there, oh those on my fabulous Friend List.  Be strong.  Remember, first and foremost, who you are.  Who you were, before all the crushing responsibilities of life piled on your shoulders.

Remember when we were alive, and childless, how we laughed?  Let's laugh today, if only over a stupid clip from Youtube.  For just five minutes, let's channel our inner children and remember why we became friends.  And if you ever want to give me the real story of what's ever going on with you on the inside while you build that Habitat house, let's get together, face to face, and spill our guts.

I'm downtown late one night, picking up a copy of USA Today, when Richard Gere drives up in a silver Lotus.  I am "workin' it," if I do say so myself, in a corduroy jumper, ribbed tights, and clogs.  Mr. Gere offers me $3,000.00 to spend the week with him.  "Mister Gere," I retort, "a Christian lady and a feminist such as I would never dream did you say three thousand dollars?  In light of a lack of child support and the lousy economy, I accept."  I call my mom to arrange child care and fall asleep before we even reach the hotel.  I wake up the next morning with my real hair color:  gray.  Crap!  I knew I should have scheduled that salon visit.

Math and I got along just swimmingly in kindergarten.  My kindergarten teacher had a box of counting bears in bright, primary colors.  I could paint a pretty picture, read an interesting book, or—entirely at my option—go and mess with the counting bears and, if so inclined, count them.  The teacher gave me high praise for looking at a fully labeled calendar and figuring out what day it was.

Within a few short years, I was thrust into a world of heartless commands like "find" and "compute" and "calculate."  Even when I could "estimate," there were strictly proscribed limits such as "to the nearest tenth."  My artistic, creative, right-brain-dominant self kicked against the pricks, but I muddled along. Then I met my nemesis.  From the day he entered my life, the academic world was divided into into two parts:  the "can-do" and the "huh?"

His name was X.  He stood for stuff. 

Like most American girls, I got my feminine ideal from pop culture.  I was 14 when I went to see Purple Rain at the cineplex, and Apollonia Kotero, love interest of the artist intermittently known as Prince, became my ideal.  She was olive-skinned, mysterious, temperamental, about 5'2", and, despite being about a size zero, had breasts like prize canteloupes.  Prince would look at her and go sort of green and gooey around the gills.

I gathered that Apollonia was a Real Woman, and that no man, much less Prince, would ever turn to mush at the sight of me unless I looked like her.  As the summer sun set over Johnson City, Tennesee (I was visiting, and my cousin got me into the "R" movie), I prayed fervently for a bouncing set of Apollonias that would make the men go ape.

Over the next few years, I overshot Prince's height by a good foot.  And then I got my growth spurt.  I matured into a pasty-white, unmysterious girl, size 8-running-to-10, about as tempestuous as oatmeal, and one of the Breastless Wonders of the Modern World.  I'm middle-aged and still praying for those Apollonias.  I don't think the Almighty is going to oblige.

I have numbered my Shoeful of children, One through Five, for this blog.  This is a typical morning of getting my children ready for school:

I tell the kids to get up at 7:00 and go
DOWNSTAIRS to get my coffee, and there are no clean coffee cups because
One did not load the dishwasher last night, so
I am washing a coffee cup when Four shows up and says he has no socks, so
I am rooting around in the dryer for socks, when
Five appears saying Three is crying because she dropped a contact lens so I go
UPSTAIRS and get down on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor and
finally find Three's contact stuck to the wall, when
I realize I haven't had my coffee yet so I go
DOWNSTAIRS and make my coffee and
the cordless phone rings and it's in my room so I run

My Shoeful of children have expressed a lot of opinions about the upcoming election.  They are not pleased to hear that mom is "Moderate, Independent, Undecided."  They've heard from a lot of people who aren't waffling like dear old Mom.  One day household opinion is running "red"; the next day it's slanted "blue."  Just call this house the Purple Shoe.  Only my high schooler has made up his mind.  Were he empowered to cast a ballot, he would vote for:  no one.  Neither candidate "impresses" him, he says, with youthful confidence that someone "impressive"—an obviously Great Leader—will appear on the political scene when he is 20, or 24, or 28.

Our local newspaper, the Galax Gazette, has a "Hotline" for people to call in anonymously, and get their remarks published in print.  Some Hotline callers are a few board feet shy of a patio.  Quite a few make no sense at all, and insult people they'd never dare to insult if they actually had to leave their names.  It's a feature that rewards cowardice and encourages knee-jerk responses to whatever happens to be bugging the locals at the moment.  That's why the Hotline is the one feature of the Gazette that I never, never miss.

One local brainiac dialed the Hotline last week and griped, "Boy, some of these women around here are unbelievable.  They need to look in the mirror in the morning before they put the makeup on."

Listen, Zeke, we ARE looking. 

A neighbor gave me four huge butternut squashes.  Since I put eight butternut squash seeds in the ground in May and haven't seen so much as a sprout, I was grateful.  I thought I would try to find a recipe on the internet which reproduces Cambell's Select Butternut Squash Soup; a family favorite, but pricey at $2.50 for two servings.  I found one web page entitled, "Copycat Recipe Campbell's Select Butternut Squash Soup"--but I'm not going to share the URL with my blog readers.  Read on to find out why.

Not that I have any experience. I am the body and soul of discretion. But I recommend that everybody have at least one idiot love affair (ILA). They are so humbling, and they suddenly make every song Sheena Easton ever recorded make sense, even the ones where she was sleeping with the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.

To have a true idiot love affair you must be old enough to know better. Seventeen-year-olds cannot have idiot love affairs because romantic lunacy is their nature. I'm thinking, for a supreme, undeniable, whack-yourself-in-the-forehead idiot love affair (in Latin, *amoris dunderheadis*) you should be at least 35.

I get high-speed internet through my phone line courtesy of a carrier I call Embroglio. Or I did get high-speed internet, for three months.

Only one more tax-free day in which to go to Wal-Mart and fight a horde of other parents for cheap school supplies. I think I'll pass.

I'm remembering last year. There I was. Crushed in the school supply aisle with 30 other parents plus carts and offspring. I was snatching at the last few 25-cent, 24-count crayon boxes, when my next-door neighbor yelled at me over the furor: "Have they got any more PENCIL POUCHES?" I threw him a pink one over the heads of ten not-very-cheery shoppers.

He threw it back and bellowed, "Any blue ones? This is for my SON!"

"Sure thing!" I roared. "Need any GLUE STICKS?" He shook his head.

"GO LONG!" I yelled, and he faded back to the index cards for my forward pass.