As bloggers, we have an open line to our readers which is part of the reason that the old media is having such a hard time keeping up with us. Bloggers have had to learn on our feet about what works and what doesn’t work. What brings readers in and what makes them stay. Likewise, we’ve had great ideas that have bombed and left us scratching our heads wondering what. the. fuck?

It’s the lack of editors, the lack of middlemen, the direct link to our friends that have made blogging and bloggers succeed where newspapers and magazines are failing. You’re not reading about the blood and guts behind the blank-eyed newspaper columnist’s life–not because she doesn’t have one, or because she doesn’t want to write about it–but because that’s not what they do over there.

But that is what we do.

Without filters in place, you get our blood, sweat and tears. It’s what binds us together as people and it’s why we connect with each other. Most of the time, I happen to think, it’s a good thing, and sometimes, it’s a very bad thing. No one wants to be attacked at the core of what we are. Personal attacks always hurt, no matter how much we say, “aw, it ain’t no thing.”

I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that it hurts when an Internet Mole Person (a.k.a. A Troll) calls you a bitch, or a fucking bitch or says this:

“I don’t know how I stumbled on your blog, but it seemed interesting in the early days. This post is crap, grow up, get a life like the rest of us did.”

That’s a comment I got. I don’t get a lot of nasty comments, and for the record, the post was badly written, but, as I pointed out to this person, “Someone who spent 29 hours on my blog should hardly tell be telling me to get a life.”

IP addresses, I love you.

There are other dark sides of the Internet, which I was reminded of this morning, when I woke up to an inbox stuffed full of messages telling me that my Mother’s Day post from this year had been stolen by a notorious blog plagiarizer. She changed the date so it “aired” the day before, but I have a screenshot showing that it did not actually do so.

I am only linking to her so that you may see if your material has been jacked too. I hate to give her any more traffic than she deserves. She had another blog, which also stole that same post, a post that was particularly meaningful to me, but she locked it down. Both sites creepily have different children as her own.

The mind that goes on behind running a fake blog composed of other people’s work is very fucked up, indeed, and while I am furious because while I reported her to Google for violation of Terms of Service and went on a Twitter Rampage of Doom, there’s not much I can do.

The bright side of this is how awesome my Band of Merry Fucking Pranksters are. Just look!

I about passed out laughing. You guys are fucking amazing. Seriously. I love you all SO MUCH.

All of the comments on that blog are from people bitching her out for stealing their posts, so clearly, it’s not just me.

This, to me, is the best part about the blog world. There may not be much we can do about stuff like this; I mean, MAYBE Google will shut her down, but I doubt it, but we all rally around each other when things are bullshit. And this, Pranksters, is BULLSHIT.

What’s interesting is that the new group blog that I’m working so hard to create this week is a site based around the concept of rallying around each other. It’s clearly what we do best and it’s one of those things we all like to do. Hell, I prefer feeling useful to feeling like I’m just sitting around taking up space.

It’s SO close to being done and I’m itching to show it off like you cannot believe, because I think all of you will want to be a part of it. I’ve been gathering material from some places so it has some stuff in it already, but when it opens, you can use anything you’ve written or anything you will write in there.

So rather than focus on the plagiarizer and the negativity she’s spreading around today, I’m going to focus on the good things:

The new blog I’m working on. The hilariousness of Mushroom Printing. How fucking awesome my Pranksters are and how blessed I am to have you all. And how odd it is that I am Number 9 on this list.

And, of course, bacon.

—————–

Since I am working on a site, I have a quick question for you. That Google Friend Connect box on the sidebar:

That is a picture, not the box itself, yo.

Do you guys like these on a site? Should I put it on my new site? I added a poll!

[poll id=”4″]

Now you can put on your Judgment Hats BEFORE I tell this story, which I would surmise, look as awesome as this:

Whatever, don’t act like you’re not jealous of my hat.

It’s my THINKING Cap, y’all (no it is. I wear it when I need to think of stuff-n-things).

So, Pranksters, you know and love me and my foul mouth, just like my children do. If I wanted to be all Blame Game about it, I could pin it on my mother, who taught me my first word: “FUCK,” and say that’s where it all began, but really, I’m kind of over the Blame Game.

I know these things to be true: I have a *ahem* colorful mouth, a dirty mind, and I’m the kind of person you don’t want to live with because I’m prone to warble Rod Stewart (love, love LOVE him!) and microwave marshmallows.

I’ve toned down most of my more awesome pairings of words in front of the kids (meat curtains, anyone?) because that’s what I needed to do, but I’ve never managed to stop swearing entirely. I know that I should and I know that it’s bad and I know that I should also grow my own organic food and stop drinking Diet Coke and probably live a life devoted to something more than polluting the Internet with my dim-witted drivel.

A couple of months ago, I was feeling masochistic and started watching 24, until I realized that I was more stressed out AFTER watching it than I was before (which is saying a lot, considering my stress level is always very high) and could no longer suspend my disbelief that Jack Bauer could hold his bladder for 24 hours a day.

That’s fucking BULLSHIT.

But I picked up Jack Bauer’s, “DAMMIT!” which I would say with precisely that inflection every single time I dropped something (read: every 2 minutes), stubbed my toe (read: every 10 minutes), or tripped over something (read: every 15 minutes).

So Alex, my three-year old picked up, “DAMMIT!” just the way Jack Bauer says it. When he dropped something, “DAMMIT!” When he fell down, “DAMMIT!” When something didn’t go his way, “DAMMIT!”

Which, when I found out it was a college drinking game, made it all the more hilarious.

I mean, okay, dammit is like the least offensive swear, and while I could have done better, IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH WORSE HOLY FUCKING SHIT, this is MY kid we’re talking about.

So, really, my speaking kids, the ones that whose minds I am responsible for shaping (don’t call CPS now) are 9 and 3 and somehow neither of them run around yelling, “WELL FUCKING SHIT, MOMMA, YOU GET YER DAMN WHORE ASS BACK IN THE KITCHEN AND MAKE ME SOME MOTHERFUCKING PIE!”

It means I’m doing okay.

Well, then you have The Daver, who is much more mild mannered than Your Aunt Becky. He’s quieter and more thoughtful and swears much less. No one would ever describe him as outrageous or colorful or obnoxious or brash or annoying or really anything negative.

Sunday, Alex was working on this gigantic marble contraption that he’d conned The Daver into buying:

And he dropped a handful of marbles onto the floor, which upset him very much, because Alex is a very focused and determined ickle guy.

Window open, neighbors right outside my son, clear as a motherfucking bell yells…

“FUCKING XXXX”

Something I can’t even repeat because it’s that offensive.

The pairing, however, of the two words he used together exonerated me, just as the pairing of the swear words that our FIRST son used. When I swear, it’s background noise. When Dave swears, the kids pay attention.

Turns out that The DAVER has taught both of our children to swear. Alex has given him a nice choice phrase–easily something to offend everyone*–just in time for his 32nd birthday, which is today!

Happy Birthday, Daver!

*I cannot wait for Alex to use this one around Dave’s parents. No, really, this will be EPIC.

I haven’t been happier that we pulled our son from the hippie nut ban! school. Okay, so I was happier the one time I realized that marshmallows did really weird things when they were microwaved, but I’m pretty sure that I was wasted at the time.

I was unsure of our motives, because, quite frankly, Dave and I stuck out like a pair of brightly colored, mismatched, rain-forest-chopping-down, as-far-from-eco-friendly-as-one-can-be-without-driving-Hummers thumbs. Now, it’s not as though we don’t recycle or love Mother Earth, because we do, and if you’ve been around for any length of time, you know that I garden like I drink diet Coke (read: obsessively).

But, according to the other parents, it just wasn’t enough. Because if we shopped at Trader Joe’s, they shopped at Whole Foods. If we shopped at Whole Foods, they organically grew their own fruits and vegetables. While I am not a competitive person by nature, the other parents seemed to feel absolute moral superiority towards us both and quite frankly, it got old after 4 years.

Adding fuel to the fire was the poor communication between the school and the parents. Like this charmer of an example. What Dave was told was that our son “ran into a fence and got a little banged up.”

What I got was this:

This picture does not do justice to how beaten my child looked. It took ALL MY WILLPOWER not to comment on it, because with Ben, if you comment on something like a paper cut, suddenly he will expect sympathy cards and ice packs. And this? DESERVED SYMPATHY CARDS AND ICE PACKS.

So I admit that I was slightly annoyed by the downplaying of his injuries, mainly because I had to rely on acting skills *I* had never honed to not shriek when I saw him. I was also several weeks postpartum at the time, so the hormones may not have helped.

The nail in the proverbial coffin was the aw-shucks sort of after-thought type letter sent home right before school was set to begin for Ben, though, at the hippie nut ban! school. Because the school was so small, you see, we had to pack lunches for our children.

Maybe for other families, this was like the heavens opening up and shining down upon them, bento boxes neatly packed with nutritious choices like edamame and perfectly cut carrot coins, sandwiched between homemade whole grain crackers and cheese made from the milk of Buddhist cows.

There were, of course, lots of restrictions about what we could and could not pack. No refined sugars. No juice boxes. No chips. No candy. No cookies. No soda. Nothing that needed to be microwaved or prepared. Reusable containers. No brown paper bags.

In theory, none of this should have been an issue.

In theory.

But my darling son, Benjamin, is autistic. With food issues.

(the one time I’d dared pack a granola bar with tiny chips of chocolate in it–and I do mean TINY–he was singled out in front of the entire class and made an “example” for daring to bring “candy” to school. He was mortified. And six years old. It was my fault and I haven’t stopped feeling bad about it since)

For an entire year, I tried all kinds of combinations of foods, and about 95% of the time, he’d come home with a full lunch bag, his lunch untouched. Certainly, while he was not starving to death, this troubled me.

Food issues were nothing new, but this particular medium–lunch food with millions of restrictions–was, and I was at a loss. The only, and I do mean the ONLY thing I could safely get him to eat was a peanut butter sandwich.

So the day that the leaflet arrived informing us that we could no longer pack anything with nuts, or nut oils, in our son’s lunch, The Daver and I looked at each other and (in uncharacteristic unison) said, “oh FUCK.”

We couldn’t get an answer as to what specifically this meant, and after repeated calls to the school, it was *shrugs shoulders* “you know, nut stuff.” If I’d been that parent, I wouldn’t have been so comforted by that answer, because it was clear the school didn’t understand nut allergies. As a nurse I did.

Icing on the cake.  Not the nut ban, but the way it was handled. I would have been scared shitless if that were my kid (turned out it was actually the SIBLING of a student) and frankly, I’d just had enough of their bullshit.

So that was that, we plucked him out and plunked him into the public school system.

You know what they have there? They have an office staff. They have policies. And best of all?

THEY HAVE LUNCH LADIES.

*cue angels singing on high*

And with lunch ladies (*hums the lunch lady song*) comes lunch. HOT lunch. Lunch with choices! Glorious, glorious choices! Every single day *I* am not responsible for providing food for my son! If he doesn’t eat? I am none the wiser.

I no longer have to sadly throw out the old, pathetic, stale and untouched sandwich each night. I don’t have to throw out uneaten shriveled carrots, looking remarkably like flaccid penises (penii?), wondering how my child will gain weight. Nor do I have to flip coins or play rock, paper, scissors with The Daver to determine who is unlucky enough to have to try and make Ben a lunch he’ll never eat THIS time.

No.

It is with great pleasure, pomp and circumstance that I write out a check every month to the lunch ladies, signing my name with an extra dose of pizazz because I am just that mother-fucking happy to be letting someone else cook for my child. I would TIP the lunch lady if I could, I love her so much. I might even bear her children, if she asked me.

And if, for some reason, I had to pack my son a lunch, I could EASILY pack him, like Dave and I were always tempted to do while Ben was at the hippie nut ban! school: a 5 pound bag of white sugar and a can of Mountain Dew. I don’t think ANYONE would say anything.

God BLESS the public school system.

———–

Still working my nards off on my new group blog that you’re going to love, but in the meantime, if you want to get your group blog mojo working, I could use some help with Mushroom Printing, y’all. Turns out everyone wants to hide the site because they don’t want anyone knowing they write there. Which is HILARIOUS to me.

Also, there’s a Mushroom Print Twitter account.

Also, do I only publish one post there per day? I can’t decide if more than that is going to overwhelm the feed reader people.

————

I’m talking about the time I accidentally bought a whole stash of Granny Panties over at Toy With Me today. I’m always taking ideas for my column over there, so if you have any, HOLLER.

I find it a little odd that over the years, the only friends I’ve actually managed to stay close with are the ones I made when I was 14, and the subject of my post from last week: My Metal Heads. Close is a relative term, I guess, but they’re the kind of people that I don’t need to talk with every week or even every month to know that all I’d have to do is pick up the phone and say, “I need a shovel, tarp, and an alibi,” and they’d be over in less than an hour with all three, no questions asked.

In a bizarre twist, I even live down the street from one of the houses that Jeremy (one half of the couple that screen prints my awesome Shut Your Whore Mouth Shirts. P.S. they make other shirts, too) grew up in.

Sure, I’ve always had other friends, but they’ve sort of flitted in and out of my life, but these guys have always been around.

At thirty now, I have more girlfriends than I probably ever have before, thanks to you, my Pranksters, but I’ve never managed to hold onto any. I’ve always just been one of the guys. With a set of knockers. Not, I should carefully add, one of the guys, in the Village Bicycle “I fuck them all so they keep me around,” kind of ways, either.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been trying to make some local friends so that I can have occasion to leave the house now and again, so I figured that my neighbors would be an awesome place to start. I’m fortunate that I like my neighbors and my house and my motherfucking roses, and while The Daver is a hermit who is allergic to sunshine, outside air, and dirt, I’m always out and about with my pickax, shovel and power washer, trying to make my house look less like zombies live here.

I’m the only woman on the block who asks for power tools for her birthday.

I’m also the only woman who does the maintenance around the house. So, when I’m taking a break from ripping out bushes and shrubbery and busting up my ankles from buying a pickax that weighs 30 pounds (say it with me now, Pranksters, nice call on buying the HEAVIEST most HARDCORE one the hardware store had, Aunt Becky), I’ll stop, and have a chat with one of my neighbors.

Now, I’m going to have to draw you a picture to show you what I look like when I’m having these talks, just so we’re both acutely aware of how I look, okay? Then you can nominate my artistic skillz for a Tony Award.

Okay, so that’s OBVIOUSLY not my garden, but I’d say the artistic rendering is pretty incredible, don’t you?

Of course you do. So please, grab a tissue and dab up your tears. I know it’s beautiful. I cried tears at it’s beauty while I drew it.

I know pictures are worth a thousand words, but you cannot hear this amazing drawing speak (besides the worm, of course), but if you could, it would be saying, “So, how do you best remove those roots? And what blade works best? Tell me again about the miter saw. Can I borrow one or do you think that’s something I should really invest in?”

At no point is the interaction ever like this:

I just don’t get it.

I don’t want to have The Sex with other mens. I don’t want your boyfriends. Ladies, I’m not interested in your husbands. Married men don’t appeal to me. I know women who like that kind of conquest, but frankly, I’m more interested in learning about power tools, and I don’t mean the kind in their pants.

See, my dad knows what a klutz I am and didn’t teach me about power tools, probably because he didn’t want to take me to the ER to have my fingers sewn back on every other week. You know what? After I’ve successfully been to the ER on 5 out of 7 of my last birthdays, busted both of my ankles on the stupid pickax in a single week, maybe he was right.

But you know what? I’m scrappy and determined and how to PROPERLY use a miter saw, THAT is what I want to know from your husband. Not how best to take it from behind.

What makes me saddest about this is that I realized I can no longer easily make new guy friends. That’s a sad realization for me.

Hm. Maybe I can get a shirt made that says, “I don’t want your man.” Think it’ll make any difference?

Also: have you noticed this, Pranksters? Can you successfully make friends of the opposite sex now? If you can, tips please?

——————

In a TOTALLY unrelated note, I need halp. I need a ton of pictures for my new site (which I am hoping to get launched tomorrow) that cannot come from Dr. Google. I need your pictures. Not pictures of your kids, but other stuff. Drawings, illustrations, photographs are awesome, but I need them to be at least 450 Pixels wide.

What I’m looking for, which is REALLY convoluted sounding, because I’m not exactly sure how to explain, are pictures, drawings and illustrations that are riffing off the titles of Choose Your Own Adventure stories. NOT the covers. Just pictures that might be sort of like the titles.

I can’t explain more than “I’ll know it when I see it.”

If you have anything, you can leave a link here, or send me something to aunt.becky.sucks@gmail.com. I’ll love you EVEN MORE than I did before. Which was a lot.

I’ll give credit, of course, I just don’t want to be stealing them from Google to get my bitch ass smacked down.

Dear Aunt Becky,

Sponsorship: Wheredya gettit?

sponsorship (noun)– the act of sponsoring (either officially or financially).

This definition plucked handily from the Free Online Dictionary, not a source I’d probably use if I were writing a research paper, but for this purpose, Pranksters, I suppose it will suffice.

I’m afraid, Prankster, I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about.

I’d guess that you mean someone who pays either for my site, in which case I’d suggest my couch. Sometimes I’ve found upwards of 35 cents in there! The downside to finding change in my couch is that it is, in fact, my own change, not someone else’s, and therefore, I’m only finding my own money. When you think of it in those terms, it’s a little more depressing.

I do run ads on my blog as you can see, and those ads pay for things like hosting this blog, my group blog, Mushroom Printing, and my new previously unannounced group blog that I will be opening this week (claps happily)(does victory dance around living room)(shakes ass). I’ll tell you more about my new blog as soon as it’s done.

As far as getting corporate sponsorship and selling out To The Man any further than I have by placing additional third party ads on my sidebar or shilling out myself to companies so that they may send me to conferences on their behalf, I do not know how to do that. I’d assume that it requires several things:

1) A sizable blog

2) The ability to sell yourself to companies

3) Approaching the companies with a good sales pitch.

Really, that’s your call as to how you want to play it. I don’t do it. I haven’t done it. I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable doing it.

—————-

Aunt Becky,

Ok I know this is probably stupid to ask but how do the “SYWM” shirts fit? I am 6’1″ (yeah yeah I know like I needed to be 6’1″ with a fireball attitude like mine.  I’m probably a matter of national security now because I KNOW I have the Air Force on edge) and shirts never fit me right.

I am (please don’t kill me) a size 8 (156 pounds) so Mediums are usually about 2″ too short and I end up showing belly. WHAT SIZE SHOULD I GET SO I DON’T FLASH MY BELLEH?

Love Kate

PS You Rock.

Yay! The Shut Your Whore Mouth shirts are awesome and they’re super flattering and I probably should mention sizing. I’d order a size up from whatever you normally wear. These aren’t like crazy belly shirts (which make me stabby) and you’re tall, so I’d go with a L or an XL to be on the safe side.

If’n you have a big rack like me, get the XL. They’re hot. You’re gonna be hot. Can’t wait to hear how you kick ass and take names in it. Please don’t kick my ass. Ever.

——————-

Dear Aunt Becky,

I’ve got a bit of a situation I’d like your advice on.  My best friend is a man I’ve known since I was abouut 5.  He’s had a bad run with depression over the last few years, and he’s currently unemployed (unrelated to the depression, but it’s not helping).  Earlier this year he started dating a 21 year old (we’re both thirty), and they’re insanely in love.  Problem is, I’m not entirely sure she’s not just insane.

She has a lot of stories about her past.  She had a child when she was 13 who died 4 years later from the toddler version of SIDS.  Her ex-boyfriend got her addicted to heroin while she slept.  Her mother’s a drug dealer and murderer.  She’s had multiple last names and was in witness protection.  Her other ex-boyfriend beat her and also happened to burn everything she owned of her child.

But she makes my best friend happy, and as far as I’m concerned, you can say your name is Cleopatra and you shit rainbows, and I’ll smile and nod for his sake.

But now the ‘stories’ have started to affect other people.  From what I can gather (because her version of events changes every time she tells it, of course), she was having trouble with her boss, so was relocated to a sister company.  Three days later, she was fired because several of her new co-workers signed statements to the effect of ‘she told us her boyfriend was going to kill her ex-boss’.  Now the ex-boss has taken out a restraining order against her and my best friend.

That one required a lot of tongue biting.  But hey, it’s his life, and if someone’s going to tell her that, even if it was a joke, that was all kinds of fucking stupid, it really should be him. Commandment one of friendship: Thou Shall Not Fuck With Thy Best Friend’s Relationship, right?

Then it got worse.

I got married, and the first time I spoke to her after the wedding, she told me she thought another friend’s husband was ‘really dominant’ towards her, and that he must beat her.
This wouldn’t happen.  He wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t let him.  But this is a serious allegation and I was distracted that night, and maybe I missed something.  So I asked another friend, one of the most observant women I’ve ever met.  Her answer?
‘WHAT?!’ pause ‘WHHHHAAAATTT?’ It turns out that the best friend’s girlfriend didn’t even speak to the guy she was accusing of battery.  Far as we can tell, she pulled this idea out of her arse.

So, basically, my best friend is madly in love with a pathological liar, and now she’s making allegations about people who also deserve my loyalty. Does anyone have any idea how to handle this?  As weird as this sounds, I love this man almost as much as I love my husband (in a different way, of course!) and I don’t want to lose him.  But not even for him can I just keep smiling and nodding this time.

signed,

Normally, I’m down with crazy.

Bloody hell, Prankster. The upside to this is that I’d guarantee everybody reading this has been in a similar situation with a friend. The downside is that I don’t know if anyone knows how to properly handle it.

So, there are a couple of ways to handle it.

1) You say nothing, bite your tongue and watch the situation unfold from a polite distance. Unless you really think you can make him see the light and see the girl for what she is (a potential lunatic), and allow him to get out while the getting is good, this may be the only way to preserve the friendship right now.

2) You go super-stealth undercover (I just whistled the Mission Impossible song) and find out about this girl’s past, and go to confront your friend with some cold hard facts about her past. If you can blow some real holes in her stories, you might have a chance of disproving her lies and allow him to get out now. Because she sounds like a sinking ship.

3) You confront him with no evidence and see how he takes it. If he’s in love, it may not be well. In these cases, it’s usually decidedly UN-well. He may choose her and leave you standing there like an asshole. It’s happened to us all when we opened our whore mouths and spoke up. But then, at least, you said something, rather than nothing. Which may make you feel a bit better. And in the end, he’ll remember it. She’ll be a phase in his life. The Bad Girlfriend.

4) Stage an intervention with a couple of friends and try and all talk to him about her. If he’s depressed, he may not be seeing the situation for what it is. I would advise trying to bring some sort of evidence to him of her lies, if you can dig it up.

Perhaps some combination of these may help and I’m willing to bet that my Pranksters have some advice to offer you on this matter. I’m certain we’ve all been there.

Good luck, darlin’. This is a tough situation. Much love to you. Let us know how it turns out.

————–

As always, Pranksters, please fill in where I left off in the comments below. And feel free to submit your burningest questions here, to the Go Ask Aunt Becky form.

Also: when the fuck did it turn into September? That’s bullshit!

Yay Pranksters! Today, I have my homeslice Miss Grace of Miss Grace’s Disgrace doing a GUEST BLOG for me. Which is rad because she’s one of the nicest bloggers you’ll ever meet. AND she’s hot. AND she’s snarky. Which is an odd mix. Normally when you say, “she’s nice” you’re saying, “she’s ugly” or something, you know?

Not so, Little Butterflies. Miss Grace is smoking. She was my inaugural BlogHer Hump. But she’s here and she’s awesome and I’m proud to have her.

—————–

It’s time! Time to break one of the cardinal rules of blogging! Gather round children, cuz I’m totes talking about Hated Coworkers.

Yay!

People!

PEOPLE WHO I WANT TO PUNCH IN THE THROAT!

1.  I’m Controversial Because I’m GAY!!1! coworker.

Incredibly irritating, accomplishes NEGATIVE work via diminishing work of others.
Unfathomably bitchy, and, as a bonus, he ENRAGES me by presuming that if anyone doesn’t like him, it’s because he’s gay.

It’s not because you’re gay, you ASSHOLE, it’s because you drain the life force out of my body with your presence, crushing my will to live. I don’t hate you because you’re gay, and now I hate you EXTRA for thinking that I hate you because you’re gay.

2.  Girl with the Unfortunate Tits.

Now I have no high horse about boobs.  Mine served their mammalian function for a year and a half and now they’re all milk-flappy and….unpleasant. No.High.Horse.

However. I don’t come to work with my chi-chis spilling over the top of my two-sizes-two-small skank shirt. Anyhow. This girl? Aside from an irritating personality I mean. This girl? She dresses like a whore for male attention, which, fine. Do as you will. But her bewbs are super fucking disturbing in that they start sagging from like, the collarbone?

Kind of?  It’s impossible to explain but ifyou’ve ever ogled her tits then YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. And OF COURSE PEOPLE ARE STARING AT YOUR TITS.  They are staring in HORROR. And it kills me because her goal is, in fact, the stare-at-my-tits attention factor. But I don’t think you realize why I’m staring.

3.  Old Men Who Ogle Me, exhibits A, B and C. (Hypocritical Much?)

I try REALLY hard not to show my ‘tas at work, because that’s not….just….these men are, all of them, older than my father, and I don’t think they REALIZE that they’re older than my father?

I mean, my dad’s pretty young. But still. STILL. Anyhow, bewbage in the workplace is never the plan. And these men, they are not TRYING to look at my chest, or stare, or anything. But! I’m a girl and I can tell when someone checks out my rack and GAH THIS HIGH NECKED SHIRT WAS INSUFFICIENT.

4.  Dude who wears the cologne of a marine trying to date rape 19-year-old girls in Tijuana. (AKA Cool Water)

5.  Lady who wears the perfume of someone’s dead grandmother, at ten times the recommended potency.

6.  Inability to Read Social Cues Girl!

I HATE YOU STOP TALKING TO ME CAN’T YOU SEE THAT YOU MAKE ME FEEL DEAD INSIDE OHMYGOD ENOUGH.

7.  Passive Aggressive Email Chick.

8.  Lady who sends all the
forward-this-to-ten-people-and-an-angel-will-kiss-your-soul emails.

9.  Profusely Sweating Dude, who smells like he lacks a sphincter.

Your turn to dish on some annoying coworkers, Pranksters! Yay!

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I’ve been publishing a post a day (which is why there’s a delay in it being posted) on Mushroom Printing, and if you’ve submitted one and you’re interested in promoting it once it’s up, just leave your email address on the top with a request to be emailed when it’s up.

Otherwise, I’ve been putting them up in the order they’ve been submitted.

Keep on, keeping on, Pranksters. Mushroom Printing is full of the awesome.

Summer holidays always confuse me. Not just because I think the only one worth celebrating is my birthday, which, *ahem* I did change from the actual date of my entrance into the world (July 15) to a day that should be less, well, cursed (July 28) on Facebook, which is kind of like when you say you’re “in a relationship” on there. It means it MATTERS now.

We’re going STEADY, me and my birthday!

With the exception of my national-holiday-birthday, I don’t get summer holidays. I mean, day off, FUCK YEAH, but we’re not like Jello Mold Salad people who burst out the limbo stick and dust off the old camper on Memorial Day or Labor Day. Probably because I don’t HAVE a camper but mostly because my idea of “roughing it” involves staying in a hotel without room service.

I have lots of traditions, but none of them involve setting up a tent in the middle of the woods where there are earwigs and trees and possibly rabid squirrels that might want to eat my face off while I sleep. I mean, if I want to “get back to nature” I can turn on the National Geographic Channel and not immediately flip through to a Law and Order: You’re About To Be Depressed marathon.

I’m all for a good BBQ, don’t get me wrong, so long as it doesn’t involve any additional planning on my end. Encased meats are kind of my thing, so any chance to roast weenies on a grill makes me happy in the pants (GO MEAT!), but if I have to turn a relaxed, “get your ass over, fuckwad,” invite into,

“Miss Rebecca Sherrick Harks kindly requests your presence at Casa de la Sausage at one ‘o’ clock in the afternoon on…”

then I’ve lost something in translation. I don’t want to have to turn a Labor Day BBQ into a LABOR DAY BBQ. Because then I have to clean and make appetizers and put on pants and we all know how much I hate pants.

This Labor Day, I’m torn. Since I’m clearly not going to be camping or hosting a Jello Mold Party, I’ll be doing one of two things (while eating encased meats pantsless, of course). Making Skittles Vodka or designing a proton accelerator.

Or maybe both. Why have or when you can have and?

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Are you a Summer Holiday Family? If so, can I come over and celebrate with YOU? Even if I’m not wearing pants? Because pants are BULLSHIT.

First, I have to say that I love you all so much that I am thoroughly overwhelmed by all of your love. Thank you.

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So when I say that I’m “not a wedding person,” it’s kinda like saying, “I’m a little stupid.” They’re both understatements that lead to things like, oh, losing your best friends and having to go topless, while riding an angry llama down the aisle of a church* as retaliation.

Weddings are bullshit, Pranksters. I’m love a party like I love a parade, but maybe it’s too many years of serving rubbery chicken and listening to the same vows over and over, or maybe it’s attending the same wedding over and over, I don’t know, but I’d rather gnaw off my fingers than go to a wedding.

I need to be clear: marriage, I’m all for marriage. I am also all for parties, open bar, and gatherings that include dressing up and/or humiliation of my best friends. But please, spare me the Funky Chicken. Take back your plate of gelatinous fish. It’s all the same rinse, repeat, cycle over and over again.

As for me, I’d be down with a quickie Vegas wedding, if I had to have one at all. Frankly, I’d get married in a Shut Your Whore Mouth shirt and happy pants at the JOP office. I love Pomp and Circumstance and any chance to drip with diamonds, but not when I have to fake brideliness.

Last weekend, I’d been invited to a wedding for one of my oldest friends, and, oddly (I say oddly because you’ll actually know them, Pranksters), the friends who make my SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH SHIRTS.**

I had no freaking idea what to expect out of this wedding other than that it was in Indiana, which is a state (apparently) that borders the state that I live in (no, not chaos. Illinois) where I have never been. I’ve lived in Illinois my whole life and never been to Indiana or *looks at map* Iowa.

So it was going to be an adventure. Especially since shit has been so fucked up that I’ve been more scattered than normal and barely got a babysitter for the kids in time to go. Because I thought the wedding was this weekend. (I also booked the wrong plane tickets for Type A Mom, which goes to show that my mind has really been elsewhere).

Hitting the road Saturday morning, it dawned on me that Indiana is one of those fucked up states that is a different time zone than Illinois, which operates under the superior time zone of Central Standard Time. Quickly, I whipped out my iPhone and googled the name of the teeny town that the wedding was held in and sure enough, there it was, Eastern Standard Time. Which meant that I was now an hour late.

I’m sorry, but states that butt-hump each other should NOT be on different time zones. When I rule the world, along with mandatory naptime I will make sure that this is the law.

Because I can’t keep anything to myself, I told Twitter, who had a hearty laugh at me, patted my head like the good dumbass that I am, and then the open road called to me. Shockingly, through some miracle of space and time, the wedding was NOT on EST and therefore I was early. Huh.

Indiana, oh, Indiana, I have to say that I love you since you are not Wisconsin, the archenemy of Illinois, but really, I’m not sure that you altered my perception of the world. Except that I learned that Air Supply was still touring. Casinos. In Indiana. I got horribly depressed about that, even though I didn’t know any Air Supply songs.

Anyway, back to the wedding.

First thing I noticed was that although the invitation said this would be a wedding in a barn and backyard, it was freaking awesome. I think barn, I think people humping sheep. This was not that kind of barn, Pranksters. THIS barn had stainless steel appliances, a full bar, a full bathroom with a shower, a pool table, slot machines, and immediately I tried to move in.

I probably would have to remove the bar signs, but I was okay with that. It also needed a pinball machine. I desperately require a pinball machine.

I was aghast that a barn could be cool. I’d always assumed that barns were merely used as a place for animal husbandry.

This was the point where I realized that the more pictures I took in the place, the more I could claim that, yes, I did live there. Why the hell else would I have so many pictures of myself there?

It’s also the point where I realized that this barn had a kitchen nicer than my own.

It’s at this point when the homebrew of my Metal Friend Scottie kicked in. Oh, did I mention this was a METAL wedding? And that these people are REALLY why I’m like this? Because it’s true.

The Metal Heads started popping into my pictures. There’s Scottie.

And that would be Evan, one of my BFF’s.

After we got suitably toasty, I watched one of my oldest friends get married. I’ve known him since we were both 14, and it was just so awesome to see, which means that my heart is slowly melting. Shut UP.

Then, the coolest thing I’ve ever seen at a wedding happened: a Moon Bounce was blown up. Dude. Pranksters. At my next wedding, I am SO getting a Moon Bounce AND a Ball Pit (one that hasn’t been peed in by small children) and it’s going to be epically awesome.

During the toasts, which normally are only interesting to the people involved (and then only marginally, because let’s face it, not everyone is a good speech writer, myself included), we toasted to meat. MEAT! Meat is like my third favorite thing on the planet, only beaten by the word “cacophony” and strawberry lip gloss.

Toasting to meat is very serious business, you see.

Metal Weddings are, apparently, the best kinds of weddings. I even remembered all of the stuff I’d learned from strippers over the years. Who knew?

*Okay, it was leading the prayers, but still.

**I’ve been asked about the sizing, and I wanted to tell you that for women, I’d order up a size. They’re SUPER-flattering (in a bizarre twist that I couldn’t even predict), but they do run a little small. For example, I have big boobs, and normally wear a M or L. I wear a L or XL in these shirts. But trust me, you’ll look fucking hot.

Also, colors? I need to reorder shirts and what colors should I order, yo?

P.P.S. If you do buy them, I want to make a Flickr group of Shut Your Whore Mouth Shirts and you should send me a picture of yourself in one. Or doing something weird in one. Because, OBVIOUSLY.

When I pulled up to the hospital yesterday and walked through those sliding doors, whirring officially shut behind Amelia and I with a snap, I was calm. I’m not sure how I paint myself here on my one-dimensional blog, but I’ve never been prone to anxiety or cases of the vapors, and typically in the moment, I’m about as calm and collected as they get. This was no different.

I gripped my phone like a talisman and strode over to the desk where sure enough, a new volunteer greeted me to help me find my way. The scent of lilies was heavy in the air and I tried mouth-breathing (one of the few perks of having been a barfy pregnant lady) to stave off the smell. Calla lilies are one of my favorite flowers, but the rest of them remind me of all of the friends I’ve buried.

Amelia, refusing to be held, led the way through the hospital, past the gift shop where I bought her heart necklace, past the chapel where I prayed for her, past the cafeteria where I remember laughing for the first time, my throat rusty and dry, the laugh unfamiliar, past the NICU and PICU, her little legs chugged along, sturdily running so fast that we had to half-jog to keep up with her.

Finally we reached an unfamiliar corridor and the volunteer whom I’d been handily chatting about tropical plants with bid us adieu. Amelia trucked on ahead, thrilled by the freedom to run up and down the corridors, uninhibited by the ghosts that roamed them.

When we found our way–because Mili always finds her way–I saw the Children’s Memorial Hospital sign on the wall across from her new neurologist’s office. In a bizarre twist of fate, this happens to be a satellite unit of the same hospital that I did my pediatric rotation through years ago. It’s an amazing hospital.

It’s hard to believe that my daughter is now a patient.

In the waiting room, Amelia made a beeline for the crayons and happily dumped them out all over the table. Screw coloring.

Eventually, we went back and met with the neurologist, who I was understandably anxious to meet. Neurologists, for those of you happily unawares, aren’t perhaps the kindest of all doctors. They’re sort of at the top of the doctor heap, only beaten by infectious disease doctors, and what’s more is that they know it. So people skills aren’t exactly important to their profession.

I was prepared to go all Campaign of Terror on him and be all “you DO know who I AM, don’t you?” and not because I am a pitiful blogger who might pathetically attempt to sully his reputation on the internet (I wouldn’t), but because I come from a line of well respected doctors who are well known. My now-middle name would be a dead giveaway, but I was all, you’ve got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em and stuff.

I didn’t even have to whip that out because he was FULL of the awesome. When Amelia took his reflex hammer and started trying to test out MY reflexes, he simply went and got another one rather than try and wrestle it out of her fists of fury.

For any of you not playing along at home, Amelia was born with a midline parietal enecephalocele which is a neural tube defect caused by the failure of the embryonic neural tube (the primitive spinal cord) to close properly. Her skull didn’t fuse and part of her brain, the part right about at the crown of her head (for anyone who doesn’t know where the parietal lobe of your brain is) developed outside of her head. It was a true encephalocele, not a meningeocele, meaning that there was actual brain matter inside of the defect, not just cerebrospinal fluid.

Having an encephalocele reduces the likelihood of survival at birth to 21%. Half of those live-births survive. Of those survivors, 75% have a mental defect. The poorest indicators for survival and associated anomalies are true posterior encephaloceles. Like what my daughter, Amelia, was born with.

At three weeks of age, she underwent massive neurosurgery to repair the bony defect in her skull with a skull implant and to remove the herniated brain tissue that had developed outside of her skull. The surgery was a success.

Mili’s neurologist suggested that we follow up with an EEG to look for any possible seizure activity while she is sleeping, as she displays none of the signs of seizing while she’s awake, because it is the last thing that can be treated. Neither the neuro nor I believe it’s seizures, but it’s worth a shot.

Any other developmental problems are simply a continuing result of her encephalocele and the microscopic neurological problems that they caused when she was developing.

Logically, I knew this. But my heart was filled with darkness as I left the office, my daughter chasing the light shining through the windows in the corridors of the hospital as I trotted to keep up with her. I wanted it to be easier.

I ducked into the gift shop and bought her a necklace. A new necklace for a new battle. And as I strapped it to her brave chest, the tears falling down my face, I whispered, “there’s the light, Princess of the Bells. Now you find your way. Don’t let anyone stop you. Ever.”

And she won’t. She’s her mother’s daughter, and if I can find my way in this crazy fucked up world, my daughter will, too. Her light will guide her, just as mine has. In lumine tuo, videbimus lumen.

Shine on, you crazy baby, shine on.

The old me died in a puddle of tears on that birthing table as my daughter whisked freshly from my body was clucked over and examined and I was left paralyzed from the waist down, terrified and alone. I was reborn into a new world where all of my old besties and allies were no longer at my side, where my husband was gone, and where I was, again, alone against the world.

It’s not terribly different, I guess, than how any of us are born, it’s just that I was older and not covered with that cheese-type stuff (say it with me now, Pranksters, thank GOD!).

For eighteen months now, I’ve carefully picked up the pieces of who I was and assembled them back into a reasonable representation of who I am now. I discarded some of the old things I didn’t need: the anger that I’d held onto for so long and the inability to let people in and the long-held opinion that I didn’t need anyone but myself to be happy.

In turn, I’ve added some new things that I think I always needed but didn’t realize: I’m warmer, more loving and I’m more thankful of the people who do love me. There are bad things woven in there too, of course. You don’t go through major traumas without picking up some hell along the way. The darkness inside me is heavy sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if it’s more than I can bear.

These shards of who I am now are stitched loosely together with the belief that the universe is far less random than I’d ever thought it was and that someday, it’ll all make more sense. I have to cling to that idea or I’d probably go crazy and shave my head and tattoo a fire-breathing scorpion on it.

Monday morning, I will go back to the place that I was born. Not Highland Park Hospital, where on July 15, 1980, Rebecca Elizabeth Sherrick* was born, but Central DuPage Hospital, where Becky Sherrick Harks was born on January 28, 2009. I haven’t been back since her surgery.

My daughter, her curls like a halo, finally masking the scar that bisects the back of her whole head, she and I will march into the place where we were both born on the very same day. My ghosts will roam the halls with us, carefully holding my hand, gently guiding me find the place where I will take my daughter to help her find her words.

I hope that when I pass the ghost of myself in the hall I can send her a hug; some silent signal of strength from her future self. Because while the darkness is omnipresent, the sadness an integral part, there is always hope. I hope that she knows that the future is large and that while she will rage, trying to fit in to a world that no longer exists, in all that she has lost, there will be more that she gains.

Monday, the flowers in the vase on the desk will be fresh, and the volunteers will smile, confused by the visibly upset young woman and her beautiful daughter. They will not understand that sometimes, it just hurts.

They will not understand that sometimes, you slay the dragon.

Sometimes the dragon slays you.

Today, Amelia, Princess of the Bells**, she and I will slay my dragon.

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*what? You didn’t think my parents named me Aunt Becky, did you?

**Amelia, by my amazing friend the Star Crossed Writer

An army stands ten thousand strong and tall,
But you shall rise above the bloody fray
And rain down vengeance ‘pon your enemies
And all those who would stand against your will.

When darkness threatens fainter hearts than yours
And calls ring out for champions to arise,
The cries will cease and everyone will see
Amelia, the Princess of the Bells.