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.