1. I made a joke about bidets in a text to my sister, and now all my advertisements are about ass cleaning devices. As far as the art of ass cleaning goes, isn’t there like… one type of product they’d be attempting to sell you, two at most Anne?
LOL. Ask me about the infant onesie that says, “Ask me about my butthole” across it. Because you will get an earful on how no human on earth should ever, ever do either of those things.
2. My kid’s school has had a ‘shelter in place’ for two consecutive days now. Both incidents involved a note threatening that a BOMB will go off in the GYM at such and such time.
Because of the hellscape that is 2022, the kids had to shelter in their classrooms next to the gym, because what if it was a trap to send kids running out of their classrooms so a gunman (or gun woman, happy international women’s day!) could gun them down?
My kid’s face was extremely puffy in the under eye area when she came home and I asked if she’d been crying and she made a face and said, “Nope. It was boring. We had to watch a movie for two hours instead of going to classes.”
So maybe it was allergies, or maybe I’m helping to raise a generation that is extremely nonchalant to the point of perhaps being a little dead inside, or maybe my kid will have years of therapy about why We Don’t Talk About Bruno gives her a chill down her spine and feelings of impending doom.
When it was all over and the school cleared for the second time, all the parents started grumbling about how this was no doubt the work of some ‘punk’ who was ‘avoiding a math test or something’ and will probably keep doing this until s/he/they get caught, fails math, or finally gets some tutoring to pass the class.
Which in turn gave me weird nostalgia for the ‘bomb threats’ of my childhood, when some kid with a car or living close to a payphone could call one in, risking their future to throw an impromptu party for the rest of us kids who then got to stand out on the field, miss all our stupid classwork, and gossip about the whodunnit unraveling in front of our very eyes.Can’t lie, those dudes were heroes to my fourth grade self. Which is very uncomfortable since all today I just wanted to throw up, drive to the school, and snatch up my kid to safety.
So I guess this is adulthood, where karma is a long distance runner.
Murder Adjacent Update
3. Also today, a county psychologist/psychiatrist for probably the prosecution (but maybe the defense?) left a jaunty message on our home phone requesting a call back. I’d always imagined psychologists as reticent to leave messages, working cloistered in secrecy and using kid-glove treatment when it came to your privacy, but this one was like, “Hi! This is Dr. Doctors, and I just started seeing AGGRESSOR. I’d like you to CALL ME so you can give me any pertinent background information! Or email me at Countyshrink.org!”
Just in case you are in a similar situation and wondering if you should keep the details from your kids, don’t worry, loudspeaker Dan will fill them in.
High School Update
4. I am still on the wondrous path of self discovery re: how fucked up my high school was.
This week, an anonymous retired teacher left a heartfelt, purple prosed, multiple paragraphed… I don’t know exactly what it was. I mean, technically it was posted to a public forum in which ex-students gather to discuss what happened.
The note was fairly convoluted, but seemed to attempt an, I’m here to support you! with a dash of, But anonymously, because somehow that is more powerful! and a heaping pile of, I, too, know abuse, and the fear of speaking out, which is why none of us do it. Which ended with a, “When you speak, you also speak for me when I was not able to. When you scream, you scream for me…” The post is getting a lot of likes and support. But every time I read it, I am
Bitch, you were the adult. You still can’t even dare put your name to this show of ‘support’, as if showing support to victims is dangerous. How were you ever put in charge of children’s safety?
But nobody else has made this observation, so maybe I’m just having a bad day.
5. And finally, FINALLY! My mom got this huge house for us all to meet in Tahoe for Christmas last year, but as you may have heard, that shit got snowed.Instead, we spent a lovely few days huddled in my mother’s house, where I drank a lot of booze.
Anyway, now we have a credit that must be used in 18 months. Fear of losing this credit is the greed that sucked me into talking to my family on a daily basis the past three days, and I cannot emphasize enough what a mistake that has been! And now it culminates with seeing them again! Making plans to live in a house with them all somewhere for a week’s time. Do I hate myself? Why am I doing this?