Hype Girls

 

My sister’s kids eat sloppy joes more than anyone else. One morning, she was hyping them up with the prospect of their usual dinner, and they all started chanting, “Sloppy Joes! Sloppy Joes! Sloppy Joes!”

Giving the chant a variation, she changed Joe to Jose. It morphed once again, and they dropped the last syllable in Jose. Things went too far when her three kids surrounded her and excitedly chanted, “Sloppy hoes! Sloppy hoes! Sloppy hoes!”

When I visited her last summer, she rummaged through her kitchen cabinet, shocked to find she was out of Sloppy Joe sauce. She ran to the store and returned fully stocked with a bag of cans. It would get them through the week.

I tried to make my kids Sloppy Joes when they were younger, but they told me they didn’t like them. In Philadelphia, they couldn’t get enough of my sister’s. She explained her technique; it didn’t differentiate from my method at all. You brown the hamburger meat, drain the fat, and add a can of the sauce. Maybe it's the hype she serves up with the dish. It’s always been her gift. 

My mom does the same when making Mac and cheese for her grandkids. My mom is very hyped. Sitting through church with her is wild; she carries on a stage-whisper chat with her twin granddaughters the entire time. Most kids don’t want to go to church, but my nieces probably love it, it’s a real soirée. My mom gets it from her mom, my grandma, who is equally excited every Wednesday when she goes to lunch with her twin daughters.

I joined them over Christmas break. We went to lunch to celebrate my Grandma’s birthday at a casino. The mood was set when a purple balloon floated down from nowhere and landed beside my Grandma. After lunch, we went shopping at Marshall’s. I found the cutest red-coiled stuffed snake for my son. It’s the year of the snake, his year. I was pushing my cart and showing the snake to my grandma when I accidentally ran into a woman in the aisle. I was so embarrassed and apologized. My 92-year-old grandma didn’t notice, so I whispered, “I just ran into that lady with my cart.”

My grandma nodded, and I knew she didn’t hear what I said. I waited to repeat it outside so I wouldn’t shout about it in front of the victim. My Grandma said, “I thought you said you took the snake out of that lady’s cart.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said. 

And she said, “Well, I wouldn’t have cared if you did.”

She’s so sweet and such good company. I had the funniest dream: my grandma and I smoked weed together. It was one of those dreams that made me smile all day long. She’s even a hype girl on the astral plane.

I’m fascinated with stories about people lucid dreaming or going to “the astral plane.” Whenever I realize I’m dreaming, I want to wake up. Today I took a nap, and I think I was starting to do it, but it was like I shot way out into outer space. Then I was floating in a body of water and the waves were getting bigger until a giant one came over me. I then was lying in a bed in a room that wasn’t mine. I stared at the ceiling and heard Mickey Mouse’s Clubhouse theme song playing.

I woke up to no Mickey Mouse’s Clubhouse. My sister was home though, on the other side of the country. Her kids had a snow day. Maybe I projected to their house, but I wasn’t in the mood to hang so I just listened to their TV.

I don’t think astral projecting is for me. It reminds me of psychedelics, you don’t want your mind to go so far away that it doesn’t come back to its full capacity. I know a lot of health experts are major proponents, but to me, they are the worst people to endorse Schedule I drugs. They have robotic, unattainable levels of self-control, and they’re too narcissistic to see that 99% of the world is more freeform. 

Let's leave moderation to the psychopaths. The rest of us are looking out for the next party, like sloppy joes, reckless shopping, and chatting through church; all that fun stuff to get hyped up about.

Ace of Base

In middle school, my friends and I were in a world of trouble after we got caught prank-calling a girl we hung out with, someone who was a friend. Inspired by the Jerky Boys, we were ruthless, dropped every cuss word imaginable, and would get into arguments if someone started laughing and fucked up the call.

Naive and stupid, we even left our diabolical calls as messages for her entire family to listen to, and eventually play to our parents, who must have thought we were certifiable psychopaths.

As I wrote my eulogy, expecting my parents to come into my room with a machete and cardboard box for my remains, I was surprised when they only grounded me and made me write this girl a letter apologizing.

At that time, we lived on shock value. We entertained ourselves by singing made-up lyrics to popular songs. The one that stuck was, “I saw the dick, and I opened up my crotch. I saw the dick.” To Ace of Base’s eternal hit song, “I Saw the Sign.”

At that age, there’s some psychological component to hearing something blasphemous and laughing hysterically. That’s probably why my kids love watching any show made by Seth Macfarlane. Usually, I’m working and overhear some crazy shit on the TV and have to walk in and remind them, people don’t talk like this. These characters are meant to shock the hell out of you. They say the modern version of how we used to say, “No duh.”

You can’t ever be too careful. They’ll have their moments of reckoning, and I just hope it’s nothing on the level of Mel Gibson. I’ll have to be like Whoopi Goldberg, on the View, defending them, “You know what, sometimes people just say some unexplainable crazy shit, and we have to make them write an apology note, and move on.”

The other day I was in the gym, and when I got out of the shower two teenage girls were standing right next to my locker looking at the screen of one of their phones. I thought maybe I should move all my stuff so I could get dressed without these two breathing down my neck. I didn’t want to seem rude, so I tried to put my clothes on without falling.

As I stood there, butt exposed, they were still on their phone, and I had a moment of panic. What if these two take a video of my cellulite ass and post it on one of their high school invisible snap chat?

They likely sensed my crazed, paranoid energy and left. Or maybe they realized they shouldn’t stand around in a locker room with their phone out. Doubtful. But I could relax and sit to put my shoes on without worrying about falling over sideways and knocking myself out.

I bought my daughter a cell phone for Christmas. It’s a phone that restricts her from going online. I’m not denying her access to the culture, she spends plenty of time online and is sufficiently brainwashed to buy, buy, buy Sephora and loads of other stuff.

Last year Kiki had a phone from her dad, but he confiscated it after her stepmom read some text that said something about being despised. That wasn’t a nice thing to say, but I wouldn’t call it exceptionally mean. I could think of twenty brilliant insults right now that I won’t list because I’d hate to have to move to LA and become a full-time roast comic. Plus, I learned from my prank-calling mistake.

I don’t have any interest in reading my daughter’s text messages. It seems invasive and imposes another layer of self-censorship. Maybe if she were hanging out with wild kids or getting into trouble, but I don’t think it’s necessary for now. She tells me plenty of crazy stuff, I don’t need to look for more.

Kiki told me last month, if I got pregnant in high school, I think I’d have the baby and put it up for adoption. Then she added, “I’d want to make sure the baby was taken care of, so I think you’d have to adopt it, but we won’t do that weird thing where we tell the baby I’m its sister and you’re the mom.”

I took the elaborate hypothetical to remind her of the best way to prevent a high school pregnancy. She looked at me like, No duh. Then she told me she thought she was PMSing, and I said, “PMS is just a conspiracy to make women feel bad, like cellulite. You’re allowed to voice negative opinions without people blaming it on mental instability from the incoming crimson wave.”

Her reply was, “What’s cellulite?”

I felt like such an asshole and tried to rebury the word. Instead of saying, it’s a concept popularized in the 70s to make women hate their bodies and buy, buy, buy products that will make them have less shame for existing. I just said, “Oh never mind, it’s nothing.”

My kids were with their dad this Christmas, and I decided to stay with my parents. What a trip. I always come home thinking, "No wonder I have issues." I spent non-meal time in a bedroom watching Real Housewives. I am not exaggerating, I watched 30 hours of Real Housewives in three days.

When I got home yesterday, I was thoroughly brainwashed to buy Tide laundry detergent, Bounty paper towels, and Febreeze for small spaces. I called my sister to vent. Three days of moderate solitary confinement gave me a lot of things to think about, and I needed my sister to hear them. After she listened, she asked, “Are you going to start your period?”

Then she said, “I know I’m about to start mine because all I can think about are crunchy tacos and my bad attitude.”

It might not be something I can sing to Ace of Base, but it made me laugh.

In Denial

 

The three ways I waste time are extensively researching vacations on TripMasters, looking at beach houses in Pismo Beach on Redfin, and playing Sudoku. I found a website that offers AI-generated tarot card readings, and this was a time tunnel I fell into one night last week.

I asked it questions I would ask a real-life psychic about life, career, trips, and beach houses. The responses were positive. Real-life psychics like to keep things positive as well, so whoever created this computer mystic nailed that. One card in the overall reading was worth noting.

I pulled Tower for my “present” card, and the interpretation provided is that I’m currently living in denial about something. It must be that I believe a computer psychic, but I wanted to dig deeper.

I haven’t been single for this long in almost twenty years. Even after I got divorced, I’d have a new boyfriend one week after a relationship ended. I like the “partnership” of hanging out, going to eat, and having someone to travel with, but in this last year, I fell in love with my alone time. I can read till midnight or fall asleep at eight pm, and eating dinner is as well thought out as I want it to be. 

I laughed out loud through Ali Wong’s latest special on Netflix. Maybe I had it all wrong by going out with people living in perpetual adolescence. After my liberation from marriage, I think my vagina Freaky Friday’d with The Statue of Liberty. Its motto became, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and the Statue of Liberty’s motto became, “Give me your doctors, engineers, and lawyers.”

I’ve been telling myself I might be one of these single-for-life people because it is so nice to do whatever I want. But maybe I’m lying to myself and should enjoy this time, as it won’t last forever.

Yesterday, I went to a spin class at the gym. After the class, a man on the bike in front of me got off, turned around, and stared into my face. At first, I smiled, and thought, “Oh, this man fancies me.” But, when he stood there and kept staring, I thought, if he isn’t adult-special-needs, then this mother fucker is surely a serial killer. I diverted my eyes from him, but I felt him continue to look.

If you’re thinking, “Alicia, stop looking so hot and this won’t happen.”

I can assure you this was not the case. The cycling class started at 6 am. My face takes time to unfurl when I wake up, like a flower. It takes a couple of glasses of water and hours to reach my fully dazzling state. In the locker room after class, standing in the mirror to blow dry my hair, I realized my eyes were bloodshot. I looked like I took five bong loads or I was testing body spray like a lab rat, and I took it right to my eyes.

Maybe he worked in medicine and thought I was spreading double conjunctivitis around the gym. Assuming a man is a doctor based on his inability to maintain social norms by holding uninvited eye contact is a huge stretch of the imagination and very dangerous if I were in pursuit of a healthy and viable partnership. I’m assuming he’s saving lives, but when confronted with the truth that his job is restocking bandaids and Tylenol on the shelves at Walgreens, I’d probably say, “Close enough.” And then end up in another relationship that goes nowhere fast.

What I’m trying to say is if I go for another relationship, I refuse to be the captain in the captain-save-a-ho dynamic, I want to be the ho. Actually, I am okay with being co-captain.

I should be consulting a psychic about the location of my son’s Nintendo Switch, which I hid after he threw his controller in a rage fit after an exhausting day that should have been wrapped up with sleepy time tea and House Hunters International, not a series of games on Fall Guys that he found himself uncharacteristically doing poorly at. He lost devices for a month, and I hid them in such a brilliant, never-to-be-found hiding spot that I have to undergo hypnosis to remember.

With his no-devices punishment, he has to watch TV with me. Maybe all his friends online are wondering where “GamerBoy69” has been. It might be a blessing he loses the switch because he’ll have to come up with a more clever gaming handle - maybe a name he understands. 

I try to widen the scope of their cinematic knowledge by making them watch classics like Psycho. But they refuse to watch anything black-and-white. Besides Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura, we aren’t allowed to watch any movie “made in the 1900s.”

We currently have a two-person recliner couch where the recliners are broken and permanently pushed out. When we want to get on the couch, we have to take flight and jump to clear the two feet to the actual seat. I usually sit in between Kiki and G, which is where the recliners divide into two separate operating systems. So I lay back on a divide, where one side of my body is slightly more elevated than the other.

During TV time, I dive deep into my time wasters: TripMasters, RedFin, and Sudoku. I want to take the kids to Greece next summer, and I’ve spent close to a hundred hours figuring out the cheapest week, the hotels we should go to, and a strategy to break up the flight from Santorini to Sacramento, which is 32 hours long.

Last winter we went to Mexico, and I forgot to pack Kiki's underwear. She tried to wear the smallest pair I brought for myself and was walking around the hotel room looking like a blonde Mowgli in The Jungle Book. We decided to wash her underwear every morning in the sink and hang them out to dry like it was in the 1940s. Thankfully, we wore bathing suits all day long.

This year, we aren’t escaping the chill by lounging in the tropics. I’m buying a new couch instead. The spacious modular sectional will be the perfect seat while I drift off to Pismo Beach, win the Sudoko world championships, and consult online psychics, sandwiched between blonde Mowgli and GamerBoy69, happily living in denial.

Thirteen Candles

My daughter turned thirteen earlier this month. On her birthday, when I was dropping her off at school, she begged me to go home. She didn’t want to go to school and thought she had the right to sit it out since it was her birthday. We were ankle-deep in the daily routine, and going home would be back-tracking since I head into Sacramento after dropping them at school.

Sitting in the congested carline, she fought me for what felt like an hour but might have been ten minutes. Her last act before facing defeat and getting out of the car was to scream at me, “I hate you.”

I funneled into the car line exit and had a massive cortisol dump. Having a fight with my daughter on the morning of her 13th birthday was the farthest thing from my mind when I woke up that day. She never yelled I hate you at me before.

I heard horror stories of “when they turn,” meaning your kids hit some age where they go from nice to a vestibule of dark energy.

When I walked my dog I ran into a neighbor, she’s a retired engineer and funny in a serious way. She asked how old my kids were, and I told her thirteen and eleven. A chill ran down her spine and she said, “Teenagers, ugh.”

I told her what happened on my daughter’s birthday, and she said, “It gets a lot better when they turn eighteen.”

I don’t know if its because their personality improves, or it’s because you go from seeing them daily to a couple of times a year.

The same week, in my writing class, the teacher commented on someone’s teenage character, and he said, “Something happens to a teenager’s brain. It is a chemical reaction.” He added, “I know this because I recently went through it with my daughter.”

He was like a man back from war, who would only share his stories with other soldiers over dollar beers at the Veterans Hall.

I thought my daughter would glide through this time since she’s an introvert and loves a good chill with her mom. When she was a toddler, she refused to let me buckle her into her car seat, and one time in a grocery parking lot, she screamed and straightened herself like a board, I broke a sweat but eventually got there strapped down. A woman approached me and said, “My daughter did the same thing; she was the easiest teenager.”

I held on to that lovely woman’s comment, maybe she was an angel, and thought, my daughter’s control issues would keep her on a straight path into adulthood.

It is not like my daughter isn’t temperamental. She fights with her brother like crazy. My son gets so much joy from making her mad; her anger fuels his fire. One morning, taking them to school, she made a comment intending to piss him off, and then he told her he was turning her in to Stop It.

She screamed at him, begging him not to do that. I asked what Stop It means; he said it’s the anonymous bully tip line at school. 

I asked him if I could use it too.

We still had fun on her birthday and talked about how that’s pretty harsh to say to anyone, let alone her biggest fan. The next day, though, she woke up sick. Was she really sick? I don’t know, I had to go to work. She stayed home and probably watched six hours of TV while drinking Coke Zeros. 

She ended up having her introverted birthday party-for-one after all. I still think she might be an easy teenager, that angel-lady from the parking lot planted the seed over ten years ago. I'm not letting it go because of one "I hate you." But, morning drop-off might not be that pleasant.

Brilliant Idea

 

Saturday morning, I was making Kiki breakfast. I stood at the stove, moving the scrambled eggs in the pan, and looked at a plate of peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I made the night before. I took a sip of coffee and thought of how well the two would go together; the cookie and the coffee: the series bite, sip, bite, sip.

These were cookies I made after watching a reel my sister sent me, of a foul-mouthed lady aggressively giving the recipe for her world-famous flourless cookies. They are equal parts sugar and peanut butter, with an egg, a splash of vanilla and a bag of chocolate chips. It was the sugar content that had me questioning my desire.

I knew if I ate the cookie, I would feel like shit. I don’t have the stomach I once did, and eating a cookie with the sugar content of a can of Coca-Cola would leave me with a stomach ache.

I ate the cookie, and then I ate another one.

After I brought my daughter her normal breakfast of eggs and sourdough toast, I lay on the couch, waiting for the corrupting backlash. It was significant, compounded by the six cookies I had eaten the night before.

This day was meant to be a writing day, and I intentionally withdrew myself from the game by giving myself a wretched stomach ache.

Around noon, I figured, I would lay back and close my eyes to try and think about the story I’m working on. I had binaural beats playing on Spotify and because I’m too cheap to pay for the membership, I deal with advertisements.

Listening to the same ads over and over is annoying. Sometimes I listen to an ad for toilet paper and the next ad will be for a different brand of toilet paper. I have the ads memorized, but I use them as goalposts at the gym. I’ll say, “Go at the fastest pace for the length of three commercials.”

But as I laid down, the ads served a different purpose. I love how Thomas Edison would sit in his rocking chair with a silver spoon in his hand. His goal was to get into the state of mind right before drifting off to sleep. The mind goes somewhere we don’t see when awake. He wanted to go there because it was when he had eureka moments, and ideas came to him that he couldn’t access after prompting the mind, “Give me something great to work with.” 

So as he rests, he starts to drift off to sleep, the muscles in his hand relax, the silver spoon drops, and he’s brought back to being fully aware. Well, Spotify ads are the silver spoon. I laid back and enjoyed the wonderful time traveling to my dream brain, but right as I was about to power down the brain and sleep, the Spotify ad and its out-of-place, increased volume, jingle intro would pull me back to fully awake.

I didn’t have a brilliant idea. The blog I wrote afterward went into the computer garbage can because it wasn’t funny. 

Actually, I had one brilliant idea. I went into the kitchen, saw the last two cookies on the plate, and ate them. I’d already wasted my day, and I wouldn't waste another.

Ghosts and Deoderant

 

I saw a deodorant commercial. This is a multipurpose deodorant, I learned as the lady talked about her “crotch smell.” When she said crotch I nearly fell off the sofa. Then I did fall off the sofa when she followed that up with instructions. She said, “Rub some deodorant cream between your fingers and apply in your butt crack.”

She made a sweeping motion with her fingers as if applying the cream to an invisible butt crack. I looked at my daughter who seemed unfazed, and said, “What the hell has civilization come to?”

She listens to music that breaks my heart, not because it is touching but because it can be so vitriolic and self-critical. I hear her repeating lyrics that sound like, “A-B-C-D-E - Eat shit, fuck you and your dog… your mom’s crotch smells like shit.” Something along those lines. Whenever I hear her unconsciously singing lyrics of this sort, I blast Cat Stevens through the house, to replace the messaging.

I saw the deodorant at Target. A man was standing in front of the shelf examining the different scents. I imagined he was buying it for his girlfriend, and then he handed her this offering, “Oh babe, I was at Target and I picked you up some crotch deodorant.”

That guy is probably dead somewhere.

My older sister is a nurse and she told me that wearing yoga pants all the time will cause vaginosis. Vaginosis is the medical term for crotch smell. Would the word swap have elevated the commercial? I’m not sure.

I’m wearing fewer yoga pants lately because I canceled my hot yoga membership. It's surprising because I was talking about yoga like the middle-aged-California-gal I am. I’ll miss the meditative benefits of yoga, but to be honest, I feel ridiculous chanting in a room full of women with Botox foreheads, collagen lips, and three-hundred-dollar Lululemon outfits.

The yoga studio times didn’t fit into my schedule so I am back to the regular old gym. I forgot how chugging a Red Bull and running six miles is just as effective at clearing my mind. So now I am working out around a bunch of people with earbuds instead of being surrounded by people who attribute their mediocre existence to the superpowers of crystals. I get it; it’s hope, and sometimes you want a tiny rock to solve all your problems.

Last week I woke up at 3 am and scared the shit out of myself thinking that a ghost could, at any moment, touch my foot that was sticking out from the cover. This made me then pull my foot back into the comforter, feeling safe from that potential ghost-touch, but it’s hot August nights, and having my entire body baking under a down comforter is not sustainable, so I’d have to stick my foot back out, then starting up the escalation of dread again.

While I work around the house, I play TV shows in the background. I like to watch investigative reporting on UFOs, Big Foot, time travel, psychics, and ghosts. I hit the ghost stories a little too hard. This indulgence keeps me from criticizing people who love to binge Fox News or CNN because I binge the equivalent of The National Enquirer.

So as I lay awake scared that a finger was going to poke me through the thin veil, I pulled out all the Catholic stops to prevent this from happening. Asking my angels to protect me and praying to the saints to keep anything scary away. My cat doesn’t help the situation, as she looks like she could be in cahoots with an alternate dimension. See picture below.

My daughter is turning 13 this year and she started her classes for confirmation. Confirmation in Catholicism is like a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, it is the ceremony when you become an adult. The church does not make the process easy. She has to attend classes twice a month for two years and do various volunteer and service projects. 

Keeping religion active in my kids’s lives is hard as a divorced person because they get to indulge in this notion of choice. My daughter said to me, “Dad said I should be allowed to choose my religion and if I don’t want to be confirmed, I don’t have to.”

I responded with, “That is what someone who doesn’t have a religion says.” But I really wanted to say, “He ought to go to church... it just might be that sad-boy cure." 

She said, “I will do it because it is a family tradition.”

My son needed to be convinced with the insight that there would be a bounty of monetary gifts from the family after the ceremony. I did feel bad having to use this tactic, but he is not as “spiritual” as my daughter, and I don’t think he would lean into anything I had to tell him other than that. 

I told them, “You will go through periods when you might not believe in God, and thats okay because you will always have this for when you have a moment where you can’t deny that God exists.”

On a smaller scale, the institution of family will do the same. There will be a time, not too far off probably, when my kids will think their parents made terrible decisions, and they’ll resent us. But, they grow through that, and the ego that ballooned with the onset of “freedom” starts to deflate, and they learn to be empathic, eventually towards their parents and the choices they made.

The other day talking to my mom, I realized she is my best friend. I don’t know how it happened but I am so much like my mom it is bizarre. I ended up being a teacher, like my mom, and this was never on my radar as a kid. I’m a writer, and my mom spent a decade working as a children’s book author. And, we both can get spooked in the night to heart-attack-inducing levels.

After I told my mom about being up all night, scared half to death there was a ghost waiting for an invitation at 2 am to chitchat, she said, “I hate it when I scare myself in the middle of the night. That’s why I sleep with an eight-inch screwdriver under my pillow.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll accidentally kill Dad?” I asked. She confidently replied, “No.”

It’s a good thing my dad is smart enough not to buy my mom deodorant… of any kind.