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My humorous thoughts about life.
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Ever wonder what Jews do on Christmas? Years ago we escaped to Cancuun, but unfortunately this didn't become our holiday tradition. After all, traditions must happen yearly.
Then there were the years we dined on Chinese food, since these are the only restaurants open on Christmas Eve. This too did not become our holiday tradition because we don't do this consistently every year.
Starry Nights
If tradition means doing something annually, it looks like we've found one. For the past three years or so, we've spent Christmas Eve freezing our butts off working the Christmas light show at Shelby Farms. Although we're in the south where one can wear T-Shirts in early December, something happens around December 24th as the temperature drops that one night we're working outside. It's our own slice of h*ll, but it's only fair since we don't have to lug heavy trees into our dens or risk our lives on ladders while hanging Christmas lights.
We have our own holiday that doesn't ask for much: Hannukkah, Channuka, Hanukkah, Chanukah. We celebrate the miracle of one bottle of oil lasting eight days. I have Crisco in my pantry that's lasted anywhere from eight months to eight years. Maybe we should celebrate it too... or throw it out. Actually, the oil might be one of the younger items in our closet. Which reminds me of my mother.
Mom had a lonely pickle in a jar sleeping in the back of our fridge for years. My friends and I used to entertain ourselves by going through her refrigerator and laughing at the mold. Who knows? Maybe something in her fridge was from the holidays.
You may wonder what kind of teacher I am. To sum it up, I fit the poem about the girl with the curl in the middle of the forehead. When I'm good, I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm horrid.
Many years ago–first graders who are now fixing to graduate college–I taught a little boy named Aki (pronounced "a key"). The kids rushed into my classroom and said, "Do you want us to get Aki?"
With my brain in the off mode, I said, "What do you need a key for?"
A little girl said, "You know, Aki!"
"A key to what?" I still didn't get it.
This banter went back and forth with me thinking. What did they need to open and why? Finally it hit me. "Ohhh, Aki! Sure."
Of course it could be worse, like the time the secretary shouted over the intercom, "We need Abeer in the office!"
It's December, which means one more week of controlling overly excited grade schoolers who don't wholeheartedly believe in that jolly dude wearing a color that only makes him look fatter. Maybe St. Nicholas should switch his costume to black, since it's slenderizing.
See how slender Santa looks in black!
The fat guy has been down our chimney once in twenty plus years. He dropped off three Christmas gifts that were addressed to kids with names we didn't recognize. Since we didn't know who these kids were, where to find them, or how to get in touch with the fat man, our kids kept the presents. I hope that was okay.
Santa doesn't celebrate at our house because we're Jewish. Someone once asked how we explained to our kids that Santa is anti-Semitic. However, the kids never saw it that way because we have our own celebration-- Hannukkah, Hanuka, Channakkah, Chanukah. No one knows how to spell it, and many don't know how to pronounce it either.
It's not too different from the other Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let's eat. Chanukkah also means gift giving. My daughter sent me the following e-mail, which I posted on my Facebook page.
Subject: if someone needs a hanukkah gift for me....
When I first met my third graders last week, the four of us played a game to get to know each other. One person states two true facts and a lie. Then everyone has to guess which statement is NOT true.
One darling little boy knew the adorable young girl all too well. After she said she had a cat, he said, "Yep. She does!"
I told him not to answer these out loud or he'd ruin the game for everyone else; so when she said she was a good artist, he smiled from ear to ear and shook his head, "Yes."
Kids can be so truthful, but their truthfulness worked in my favor when someone passed me in the hall and wished me a happy birthday. "How old are you?" The kids asked.
I told them I couldn't say it because it's one of those zero ages, and it's an "F" word.
One little girl said, "I know! You're forty." Got to love her.
For this week's Silly Sunday at Rhonda's Laugh Quotes, I've searched the internet to bring you some funny works of... well you'll have to figure that out.
No this story is not about Delta Airlines, even though they too are a "toilet bowl operation." I'm participating in Shelly's Crazy Alternative Reality over at The Life of a Novice Writer. She's presented four pictures and asked us to write a one hundred word story about one or all of them. I originally thought the assignment was 300 words and have been whittling my writing down but fail. I'm at 140 and have removed most of the detail to give you a bare bones story. I'm going to leave it as is, sorry Shelly.
The truck’s three wheels skirted around a cactus while sheep carrying the corner with the missing wheel kept it from scraping sand. Aries is rising covered the back window.
The truck halted. Bolts and cogs shot into the sand.
A cowboy carrying a rotary phone stepped out of his truck. “Don’t pull my truck apart!”
The sheep’s eyebrows narrowed as they glared at the cowboy.
“The brochure says, “Sheep is mild.” You buckin’ requests?”
The sheep raced away, so the cowboy dialed the phone.
“What kinda toilet bowl operation you runnin’? My sheep took off.” The cowboy nodded. “Fine. Send me twins.”
He tossed the phone into his truck.
Two identical women wearing bikinis approached the cowboy.
“You gonna run my truck, Sweet-cheeks?”
“We’re gonna drive while you run.” The girl’s smacked a sticker over the other one: Gemini Rules.
When I was an innocent twelve year old, my big sister explained all those naughty words we weren't allowed to say but needed to know before entering middle school. When she came across the "F" word, she refused to define it because it was too naughty to talk about. Those with me in those early seventies, now know the bad word: "fifty."
Unfortunately, urban dictionary did not exist yet, and Bev's little vocabulary lesson was not nearly enough.
In the seventh grade, I had a crush on an eighth grade boy who I didn't know and still have never spoken to. Knowing he was Jewish, I needed to let him know that I was/am Jewish too. When we had a fifties day, I wore my earrings. A friend told me that the only people with pierced ears in the fifties were prostitutes. Here was my chance to let the boy of my dreams know I'm Jewish. I loudly said, and repeated multiple times, "I'm not a prostitute, I'm Jewish." Okay, prostitute sounds like protestant, and I didn't know what one was anyway so... oops.
Apparently, my classmates were not as innocent as me. They repeatedly mentioned a catch phrase of, "Sit on it" when at odds with each other. To add even more emphasis to the phrase, they would say, "Sit on it and rotate." Being super naive, I didn't know what this meant but said it anyway when my sister upset me. My mother held the dish soap under my nose and yelled about how she'd wash my mouth out with soap. Dirty? Did I say something dirty? Back in my middle school innocence, I didn't know that phrase was dirty. Oops.
Then came sleepover camp. Late night Truth or Dare with a crowd of boys and girls was the ultimate fun in middle school, until Ruthie asked me, "Are you a virgin?" Not knowing what a virgin was, I sure didn't want to admit to being one, so I said, "No."
Oh my. The faces around me turned white and mouths dropped open because who was not a virgin at age 13 in the seventies? Of course, I didn't know why I got their strong reaction to my answer. Ruthie explained to me that a virgin is someone who has never had sex.
Oh! A virgin! I thought you said, "Virgo." I'm a Sagittarius.
GBE2's topic for the week is "Bucket List," which means things you want to do before you "kick the bucket." My desires are short but mine.
(1) I want to publish a novel. Although my third manuscript is strong, it's been rejected by a few–okay a lot–of agents, but that's their mistake. I mean, who wouldn't want to be engrossed in a story about a teenager running from mob dudes?
My fifth book is also strong, but I have yet to quit polishing it and send it out. It's difficult for an author to drop her hands from the keyboard and say, "This is as good as it's gonna get." Plus, after meeting Linda Sue Park, I'm determined to make every detail and object in the novel count–including the blue bucket. I'm just not there yet; but when I am, hopefully the world will enjoy meeting Knob.
(2) I want to travel to New Zealand and visit Rhonder. I've never been to NZ, Australia, Fiji Islands, or anywhere else in that corner of the world. Unfortunately, we are college poor as we work to educate our young. But one day, I will sell my award winning novel and hop on a plane across the world. Please God, let it not be a Delta flight!
As far as bucket lists go, is there such a thing as an anti-bucket list, aka - things I DON'T want to do? We can call this the mop list since mops take care of what falls out of the bucket... and it's usually a mess to clean up.
I don't want to sky dive. Rhonder did, and it almost killed her.
I don't roller coaster or thrill ride. I even wet my pants on the little log flume at Six Flags.
I have no desire to visit the moon, the bottom of the ocean, or war torn countries.
Call me no fun, but I'm a gal who likes her feet on the ground. Now socially, I have no filter and have been prone to say what comes out of my mouth! If that doesn't make sense, you don't know me. ;-)
Since you asked, here is the story behind Wilberfoss' name. Daniel's been calling Erica "Erca" for years, and he also named Judy "Mirum." When we visited Charleston for his graduation, one of his friends was confused. She thought Daniel had four sisters.
My daughter had a flight on Delta this Thanksgiving Holiday. She started by sitting on the runaway for an hour or more because of weather. I'm not sure what sort of weather threatened Orlando, Florida, but my guess would be a winter storm system blowing blizzard like conditions through the sunshine state.
By the time she arrived in Atlanta, her connections to Baltimore had finished loading and under penalty of law--NO PASSENGERS SHALT BE ALLOWED TO BOARD. Fear not, a flight to Knoxville prepared to take off, and we'd be passing through that city in thirty minutes. The nice man at the ticket counter plugged the changed flight arrangements into his computer and printed her a lovely paper that he signed. "Just take this to the Knoxville gate and board."
Lying snakes! After lugging her luggage (I guess that's why it's called luggage) through the delightful Atlanta airport, the nameless clerk–Judith Campbell– would not let my daughter onto the plane. She snarled at her as she said, "He's not authorized to change your flight." Mind you, she's not authorized to be a clerk! Instead of simply letting her on a plane, Dumb Delta paid to put an eighteen year old in a hotel by herself, give her a voucher for breakfast, and make her get up at an unGodly hour to board an early flight--that also sat on the runway due to mechanical problems. Finally they allowed the plane to take off–NOT! Apparently the radio malfunctioned, so they stopped the take off to turn around and get it fixed.
I spoke to the Delta folks and told them, she needs the price of her ticket refunded. The "nice" lady told me the only way to get the money back is to send her back to Orlando. She offered me a whopping $150 voucher. Wow! One-hundred, fifty whole dollars! Delta sucks! Unfortunately to use the voucher one has to get back on one of those *&;#% planes.
The theme of this week's GBE2 post is laughter. The first thing that came to mind was that delightful song from Mary Poppins. When the movie hit theaters in 1964, my mom wouldn't let me see it because, "I couldn't sit through a movie." Having never been to a movie, I pictured tall seats that one had to balance on or you'd fall off. Why else could I not "sit" through it? Eventually I saw reruns of Mary Poppins on cable, and this scene is awesome.
Laughing from a movie is great, but the best kind of laughter is the home-spun-something-funny-just-happened type. As a teacher, nothing beats making a class laugh. It satisfies my unfilled dream of being a stand up comic. I also hope to make kids laugh with my writing. According to Bruce Coville, that's easy. You just need to include the magic words: fart, pooh, underwear, toilet, and what was the other? Excuse me, I'm having a Rick Perry moment.
At my ten-year high school reunion, we all folded up when reminiscing about sixth grade. When anyone was feeling playful, they'd whisper "underwear" and everyone within earshot would crack up. underwear. Underwear. Underwear! UNDERWEAR! Are you laughing yet? If not, congratulations. You've made it out of the sixth grade mentality.
As for farts, my son said it best in eighth grade, "When we were in sixth grade and someone farted, it wasn't funny; but now, it's hysterical!" Here's the proof. Boys become less mature with age. Although in reality, an occasional fart in an odd setting can still make adults cackle.
Sometimes laughter isn't good medicine. I'll never forget my husband making me giggle after surgery. He didn't realize how much his jokes hurt until I cried from laughing. Then there's the old, "Don't make me laugh or I'll wet my pants." Who has never leaked from more than just the eyes when something was funny?
She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named recently told us a story about not being able to hold her pee when laughing. (Pee-that's Coville's other magic word!) She was at a neighbor's house playing a game called, "Naked City." All the little girls took off their clothes and sat around laughing. Unfortunately, laughter led to wetting the neighbor's carpet. She never told her friends or the neighbor's Mom what happened. All I can say to that is POOR Cocoa! I'm sure that black lab got a bawling out for that one.
I leave you with another great movie. This scene from Singing in the Rain makes me laugh every time I watch it.
