Anne Nahm

Some Kid: I danced the chicken dance so hard an egg fell out.
ME, laughing: What did you say?
Kid, raising eyebrow: What do you think I said?
*

While on the phone to my Little sister:
ME: I’m trying out veganism this week.
HER, real annoyed: Well, enjoy pooping like a salad shooter.
*

Downtown:
Really tall twenty-something chick, flinging door open, yelling at her friends (while a short dude in a shirt that states “In dog beers I’ve only had one” looks at her like a scared Chihuahua): I’m so pissed, I need Jesus right now.  I should be in church!

*

ME, holding up ride along toy with broken wheel: Let’s toss this.
4-year-old, excitedly: Let’s give it to GoodWill!
ME: Well, we wouldn’t want another kid to hurt themselves on the broken part.  That’s pretty sharp.
4-year-old, excitedly: Let’s give it to BadWill!

On trash day, one of the neighbors occasionally crosses our little street, opens my family’s trash/recycling bins, and inspects the outgoing stuff. Or at least, I see her do it occasionally. Maybe she does it all the time and I only catch her every now and then. After peeking, she walks up her own driveway and takes her own bins to the curb.

I don’t understand. Is she checking to make sure the trashman didn’t already stop by? Because it’s 8:20 in the morning. Is she checking if we have extra space and because she has an overload of junk?  Perhaps a big nose full of week old baby diapers gets her motor running?

Thus far, it has been a strange little soap opera that is interrupted by babies crying or phones ringing. I do suspect she waits until my husband takes the big kid to school, because she is out there as soon as his car turns the corner. She otherwise seems rather friendly. Somehow I worry she will lean over too far one morning and topple in. Like she is a curious kitten in pink juicy couture sweatpants.

While reading another blog a few days ago, I spied a comment signed with a person’s first and last name.  Guess what?  I know that person in real life!*  Toodling around the internet nigh on 10+ years,  this has never happened.  Oh small internet world!

When I realized it was really her, I slipped out of my chair and hid under the computer desk out of instinct.  Once I figured out (again!**) that her comment could probably not actually see me, I scrambled back up,  clicked on her link, and read the front page of her blog.

It was fairly bizarre,  to read the private thoughts of this person I had previously only had access to on a social niceties level.  Without knowing her traffic info, I didn’t want to linger and perhaps alert her to any future peeking I might do, so I only read every single thing on her front page.  Twice.

As I was doing this, I had this big internal debate about reading/lurking, because is it right to read private thoughts of someone if you know them but you don’t announce yourself?  It must be, right?  Because  public blog.  But also?  Felt rather dirty afterward.

Really, though, I had no intention of revealing myself, because the whole experience  felt pretty close to recognizing a long lost acquaintance… while she is showering in the public swimming pool bathrooms.  Naked, wet and prone to get shampoo in her eye if you disturb her.  You can’t say, “Hellllloooooooo, Sandy!” and then run up and air kiss.  At least, not without considering the likelihood of a) scaring the crap out of poor Sandy, b) slipping on wet tiles as you run over there and breaking something more than your dignity, and/or c) ending up being escorted out of public bathrooms by beefy security personnel for scaring shampoo-blinded naked chicks who don’t recognize you/might actually not be the person you thought they were.  So I quietly bookmarked, and now her blog is like some toasty pastry in my Favorites folder, waiting until it cools down enough for me to slink over there and look again.

Not surprisingly, I am suddenly super concerned about where people who read my blog come from.  The hometown of my ex-best-friend from 15 years ago?! Aghhh! My mom’s sister’s summer home IP address?!  Delete! Delete! Delete! It’s completely freaking me out.  Although, to be fair, I may have had an excess of anxiety already when this thought occurred to me, but it has become my second favorite can’t-sleep-anxiety-rush question.  See, in my own way, I am an adrenaline junkie.  Except, I don’t jump out of airplanes or punch sharks.  I lie in bed at 1:00 in the morning alternately speed thinking Go to sleep! Go to sleep! It’s 1:00! and You have written something that confirms you are Bad! Kid!, and while you are lying here in bed, someone you know is reading it.  And forwarding it. And all privately agreeing that you are embarrassing yourself horribly. And now, since I have spied on and identified a real person on the internet, isn’t it super likely that someone has spied me?  ISN”T IT?!?!?

I could totally make you a very intricate little anxiety decision tree with that as a main branch with a hundred little deviations to get me continually stoked out on anxiety, but my kids have to go to school today.  SCHOOL!

* Pretty much confirmed by clicking to her blog. Which, by the way, doesn’t use her real name at all.

** Large portions of my internet life are me acting like one of those dogs in front of a mirror – yeah, that one who never actually figures out that the mirror is a reflective device and not a window to show another dog behind the mirror.  Constantly!  I’m like holyshitanotherdog! only to bounce around to the back of the mirror and go all sad faced where’dhego?

Hey, thanks for the well wishes and suggestions about my dad.  They were appreciated.

***
Last night, I was in the shower, and a huge black spider poked out from behind the curtain and skittered across the wall behind me.  Apparently, it saw me seeing it and froze.

I have horrible eyesight.  Since I was not wearing corrective lenses of any sort, I had to get my face pretty close to Spidey to see if he was a black widow or more harmless wolf/generic/notblackwidow spider.

However, every time I got my eyeball close enough to try to determine shiny & slick & bulbous or not, the poor guy would panic, fall off the wall, and land down behind the shampoo containers on the ledge.

He was kind of adorable after this happened twice, because then he’d scamper back up the wall all freaked out blurry black blob style, look around, see me, and freeze again.  And also, a little disconcerting he was so fast.  Anyway, I finally got a good enough look to guess he seemed harmless, and since we had bonded over his freak outs, I decided to let him stay there, on the wall, and bother him no more.  Live and let live, I say.  Enjoy the Anne Nekkid Show!

Of course, as soon as I made that decision, I bent to get a shampoo bottle, thereby moving out of the shower spray, which hosed the poor guy down into the tub.  A drowning spider is one of those pitiful but weirdly funny in a horrible way things.  All eight legs thrashed wildly as he circled the drain, all Help Meeeeee!

But I just couldn’t.  He was a spider, yo.  If I’d tried to rescue him, he would have crawled right up whatever limb I had extended him, bit me, made a nest in my hair, laid eggs in that nest, crawled into my ear canal and died.  And I’m not sure the I’m on good enough terms with the neighbors to run screaming out on the lawn, naked and covered in bubbles.  Which would have to happen if there was a dead spider in my ear.  I did feel real bad though.  Spider Eulogy in comments, anyone?  I can’t think of anything appropriate.

Then!  This morning!  Our family was awoken bright and early by the middle child screaming hysterically.  Apparently, she woke up from a Scooby Doo dream to find a Daddy Longlegs spider tiptoeing around on her chest. The kid has never liked spiders, but since around 3 years old, she has tried to play it cool, just eyeballing them and breaking out into toddler sweats and walking backwards to the nearest exit.  Not this morning.  She was full on can’t breath freak out.  To be fair, the spider was huge, and it was busy running the hell away from my kid as fast as it could go.  It was already across the room and headed for the door by the time my husband caught it, proved he had it by showing Middle child the spider’s caught body, and flushed it down the toilet.  My husband is usually the kind of guy who takes creatures to an exit and releases them back to the wilds of suburbia, but I guess it was too early in the morning, or he took personal offense to the spider or something.  Anyway, Nahm Household Piping is now the great repository for wayward spiders.

Finally,  I was in the garden the other evening, and this frog landed on my bare foot and felt like the world’s funkiest, wet-silk toe ring, grabbing on to me with tiny padded limb.

I don’t usually go all Southern Auntie and say how cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute and itty bitty precious things are, but guys?  This frog made me want to have another baby.  I employed my 4 year old to hold it so I could take a picture.

The frog perched perfectly on her fingertip.

But it was too fast for my camera.

Last night at dinner, I had one of those sabotage PETA moments, where they kidnap you and throw you in the back of the van and force you to watch how food is made.  Except, you know, the whole experience came via a box of fishsticks.

I get sick of making homemade food three times a day, seven days a week is why.  Soooo boring.  I mean, fun if you have a spanky new apron and you feel all cookish.  But boring as hell when it is like the 250th consecutive meal and you’re tired and man, why is it not OK for our whole family to pretend like we are a bunch of bachelors, and we can bond by eating tuna out of  a can over the sink?

Plus, sometimes, when I’m wheeling around the grocery store and the kids are three hanging monkeylike creatures, howling and threatening to tip the cart with their swinging body weight, asking for cookies, the smallest one rips off her diaper and waves it in the air like a big white SURRENDER flag?  Except, clearly, I am the one who is supposed to do the surrendering.

Well, I must admit that on occasion, I just throw shit in the grocery cart and call it a day. Later, we eat whatever I got.  But not over the sink!  Just to show you that I haven’t totally thrown in the towel.

I know a lot of you meticulously plan out the whole week and then shop for every little thing with your print outs with neat little boxes to the left and ordered by location.  Check!  Check!  Check!  So satisfying, I assume.  But chaos groceries is how we roll in this household.

Anyway, I do kind of half heartedly try and buy the processed food that is least processed looking.  I now realize this is a big mistake.  If going for processed food, you should go for the most processed.  Like on a one to ten scale where tomatoes hanging off the vine are at one end and hotdogs are at the other, if you are going for processed, you should go 11.  That’s my thinking this morning anyway.  Because otherwise, you are halfway through your fishstick (that you are enjoying!  Because all you had to do was pop it in the oven and make a side salad, instead of season some stuff and simmer it and think about it and make sure you had all the ingredients and stuff.  Hallelujah!  Oven ready!  Processed!  Fishsticks!).

Yeah, I should just cut right to what was waiting for me inside the fishstick, right.

My half eaten fishtick!  With homemade tartar sauce!

And Right Here! Under this Cut! The WormoftheOcean that I wrapped around my fork, thinking, Hmm, that is unusual color and texture for a hunk of fish, and then pulled slowly out of the rest of the fishstick, until it freed itself with the tiniest plop! sound.

So as I’m sitting at the table, mostly thinking Ctrl-Alt-Delete over and over like some kind of purification ritual, some small part of my brain is thinking I need to go vegan.  Because this stuff always happens to me.  I am always finding the chicken embryo swimming around in my scrambled eggs or that one big vein that’s always hanging out in a leg of chicken like rubber tubing.  It’s not that I care about the animals so much as my squick factor is taking over.  Maybe after a month of no animal product, I’d lose my skittishness.  Maybe I’d miss it so bad I’d eat the ass out of a horse or something.  But I don’t think I’ll ever eat the ass out of a fishstick.  At least not again.