1. My husband half-quit his job a few days ago. He goes 60% in a couple of weeks. Everyone says the American Dream is to work for yourself. Oddly enough, they also say, “don’t quit your day job.” Which bit of wisdom will win the ultimate thumb wrestling saga of finances in Casa de Nahm? I’m kinda curious about that myself.
2. I got an agent for the book I wrote. There may or may not be any further details on this matter, as it is a big, complicated FUBAR about which I care a great deal and I suspect you care not at all. And rightly so. But, all this secret keeping is gumming up the works, so there it is. I reserve the right to mention this and then absolutely refuse to even acknowledge any follow up questions, starting right….. now.
3. I haven’t gotten a babysitter for the kids yet. Some wise person in comments suggested I get a babysitter. As a kid I had a lot of babysitters. I was the Hugh Hefner of the babysitting scene, what with wearing my tiny smoking jacket and having scores of chicks cater to my every whim.
Sometimes I think about defending my current inability to hire babysitters with some stories from the way back Hef days, but then I think, ‘why mess somebody else up who probably does need good babysitting and doesn‘t need to be all paranoid (like you, Anne, you fucktardwithnobabysitter) about a couple of isolated incidents from thirty years ago?’ Right? It is simply fair enough to say I have a hard time hiring a babysitter for my kids, even though I whine incessantly about not getting a break. I will share details in the spoiler section below, but they are kinda like this link about re-tagging stained panties – once you get an idea of the stuff that happens from time to time, it may compel a bitch into incorporating a lot more bleach into her daily routine*.
*Babysitter Paranoia Spoiler: Oh fine! It wasn’t that bad. When I was 8, some chick left me in a car in Arizona in August for 45 minutes in the parking lot and told me and my sister not to roll down the windows or people might kidnap us**. When she found us surrounded by panicked onlookers, being bathed in hose water from overheating and heat exhaustion and whatever else that nearly kills kids in 100 degree weather who are locked in cars, she cried and cried and made me promise not to tell my mom what had happened. (It was her second day taking care of us.)
I swore, and later broke my promise and told my mom anyway, and I never saw that babysitter again. But I felt real guilty about breaking my promise. And stressing my mom. And about not unbuckling my little sister from her car seat – she was sweaty and red faced and begging me to, but I was too scared not to follow the rules. And scared of kidnappers. Very sorry about that, Middle. You were really, really right.
A different babysitter dislocated my sister’s shoulder by yanking her arm.
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Another one stole one of my mom’s shirt (it had a stain on the front! WTF? Steal something decent!) and later wore the stolen, stained shirt to baby-sit us.
*
Another babysitter held cock fights in her barn at night. There were all these bloody razor blades back there, and this big old rooster with his eye gouged out. We were not supposed to go into the barn under any circumstances. Guess where we spent most of our time? Barn!
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Another babysitter showed up with these weird bruises around her neck, and when my mom asked about them, the lady blushed really hard and said they were hickeys. Looking back on the whole scene, I’m pretty sure she got choked out. But to this day I still have hickey phobia. In fact, I once drove by a Hickey Park, and all my friends giggled like crazy, and I just broke out in a cold sweat.
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Anyway, most of the babysitters were some degree of not-to-bad, just over the course of maybe a hundred of them over my childhood, we got our share of weirdoes. Like the anorexic who kept cooking really bizarre and inedible things - she was this walking skeleton creature, and her hair fell out all over the place, including the food. She’d be all, eat, eat! and forking some brick of a casserole at us, with one curly, thin hair baked into the top. As far as I know, all these people somehow managed to have decent resumes and the three standard references. Where was I? Oh, yeah, why I have a hard time trusting people to baby-sit my kid.
** The kidnapping thing was hella scary, because this had just happened (click here for horrible kidnapping story about a child who lived in AZ at that time) and so all adults were telling kids to not get kidnapped.
