The Lottery

 

I was searching my mom’s bookcase for a new read. It was a trip down memory lane, so many books I abandoned on one of the moves I made in the last twenty years. I pulled out a book How to Win Lotteries, Sweepstakes, and Contests in the 21st Century. My mom said, “You can have it.”

The book was from 2004 and was a second edition, so I’m not sure how things changed in the first four years of the 21st century, but obviously, I was reading this book. I flipped through the pages, and lucky for me, my mom highlighted all the important parts. I didn’t know we were so alike.

Last summer I read The Power of Positive Thinking and made a set of flashcards to have on hand. My son also has this delusional optimism that the lottery is ours for the taking, evident by him jotting notes while listening to the audiobook Think and Grow Rich.

Last week, I stayed with my parents for a few days while my kids were on vacation with their dad. My mom and I went to TJ Max and Ross and every night my dad would make us dinner.

I secretly check the expiration dates on everything because they won’t. Those dates aren’t even a suggestion to my parents. I’m strategic after noticing they’re trying to feed me something old, and I pretend I don’t have the appetite for it rather than mentioning its toxicity. Refusing to eat salad dressing that expired in 2016, I might as well slap my dad across the face. He is just like his mom, in this way. My older sister Lacey ruined a family dinner one night after spreading the news that my grandma scraped mold off the top of salsa before feeding it to us.

My mom isn’t as sensitive about my adherence to expiration dates, but she thinks it’s dramatic. Of course, I started my period the day I arrived at their house, and forgot to buy tampons when we were out running errands. I told her, and she ran off to grab some she had under the sink.

I flipped the box over and saw the year 2009. Maybe I would have considered it if the applicators weren’t plastic, but I told her, “No way, I’ll just keep making homemade toilet paper pads.”

My mom said, “That’s ridiculous. If you’re really that worried, take it out after four hours instead of six.”

One night we watched Expendables 3. Well, my dad left ten minutes after it started to go work in his office. We wouldn’t have picked the movie if it weren’t for him, but the agony of picking out another movie was too overwhelming so we committed to it. I’m glad we did. The ridiculousness of the cast, every 90’s action star, was hysterical. We nearly fell off the couch laughing when Dr. Frasier Crane strolled on the scene.

I read about a movie at the Cannes Film Festival getting an eleven-minute standing ovation. Eleven Minutes!! Even the best movie I’ve ever seen, I don’t think I could clap longer than one minute. Wouldn’t clapping for eleven minutes cause nerve damage, or make your hands fall off?

The Hot Chick, a Rob Schneider classic, is a 21%. You can’t trust the critics. My childhood favorite, Pretty Woman, did better than I would have thought with a 60%. 

Tomorrow I’m turning 42 and I feel more like Margot Tenenbaum than Vivian Ward. I remember, as an eight-year-old thinking how amazing adulthood would be. There’s Julia Roberts, making money, getting high fashion, and aspiring to finish high school. And here I am reading the highlighted parts of “How to Win Lotteries, Sweepstakes, and Contests in the 21st Century.”

I guess I missed the key takeaway from Pretty Woman, don’t kiss them boys on the mouth, it will only bring on trouble… unless they drive a Lotus Esprit and are best friends with George Costanza, then it’s like winning the lottery.

Shameful Summer

I’m on summer break and my kids are on summer break. It started for them on Tuesday, but mine started two weeks ago. I took the first few days to binge every docuseries made this year. I watched Brandy Melville, The Jinx, Ashley Madison, the Kevin Spacey one, and a few more probably about cults. 

A brief review of each: Brandy Melville is more a representation of our times; the A-story is about the objectification of beautiful women by a misogynist and the B-STORY(!!!) Is about slave labor in fast fashion and how the coast of Ghana has turned into the world’s Sally Anne, with literal mountains of used clothes spilling into the ocean. I’m not saying these girls’ stories weren’t moving, I’m just saying there was a much more important story to focus on. The Jinx was analyzed from the front, back, ear, mouth, and nostrils, there is nothing that was not said in this 20-hour story. Ashley Madison just gave me anxiety that my ex-husband was on the website, and as I started trying to figure out if he was on that list, I had a moment of STFU, where Rafiki hit me on top of the head with his stick reminding me to let go of the past. Lastly, the Kevin Spacey doc, ummm, I hate to say it, he did some fucked up shit, but it was not even close to being categorized as rape. After we found out what his dad was likely doing to him as a kid, I think we can forgive him if he promises to only pull his dick out around people who consent regardless of him helping their career. That’s also why I say, “Free the Menendez brothers and give them all that damn money.”

Back to the kids’ summer vacation. The first day was very chill because both of them were sent home sick, so we watched twelve hours of TV. Unlike me, they’re unable to do this two days in a row. They recovered and needed to be stimulated beyond The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers.

I will start complaining: I’m becoming increasingly bothered by doing dishes seven times a day. My son is a morning person, he wakes up before six am and gets in the shower, he’s textbook seize the day, and my daughter is a night person, who will start talking at remarkable length from 9 pm - 11 pm, kindly asking to make another point after I tell her she needs to go to bed, and without waiting for an answer, continues on her analysis of Jojo Siwa’s recent transformation. This all means that I am getting no sleep.

My son brought me coffee this morning and when I dragged myself out of bed thinking he was the sweetest of sweetie pies, I noticed coffee drops spotting the carpet down the hall. I had to bite my tongue and hold on to the sentiment.

My daughter loves making face masks. When she asks if she can make face masks from things in the kitchen, she might as well ask, “Can I make a huge fucking mess, put us at risk of salmonella poisoning, and invite all the ants to parade around the kitchen to these undetectable drops of honey on the speckled countertop?”

At the moment, there are mysterious wet spots on the carpet all around the house and when I ask the kids what’s going on, they shrug their shoulders like I’m stepping in phantom puddles. Seriously though, I think they’re walking around the house with steins full of water and sloshing their cups as they move about like they’re eight Coors Lights in. 

When Geoffrey feels the slightest tinge of boredom, he antagonizes Kingsley until she screams like an asteroid is headed straight for our house. My neighbors are probably grateful for the heatwave because I had to shut the windows to turn on the air conditioning. For the entire last month, when we were in that delightful time of year we went to bed with the windows open, they had to endure my daughter screaming in agony to wake up at 6 am for school. I run up to her, and stage whisper, “The neighbors can hear you!” She doesn’t care.

This afternoon after their bickering reached a frenzy, the three of us sat around the beat-up IKEA table to have a RAP sesh about basic conduct. I explained to my son that when my brothers and cousin called me a fatso as a kid, it fucked me up as a young woman. I told my daughter that screaming your head off is the fastest way for the world to tune you out. It’s sad, but true.

I turned off the TV. The amazing TV with free and easily accessible entertainment. The kids are in the kitchen making a stop-motion video with an iPad. I know, it’s still an electronic device, but they promised to stay off of YouTube and only use the app. I enjoy hearing them have funny conversations while I’m down the hall in the comfort of my bed with a laptop on my lap.

I really can’t dole out parenting advice because I have a special situation where my kids leave three days a week. So when things get tough, I (ashamedly) say to myself, “I can get through this,” since they will be leaving soon.

Their dad is on a work trip, so I have them for a long stretch. It will be twelve days; we are five in, but who's counting? I love having them around, and I miss them terribly when they’re gone, but I need to hide in my room every once in a while, which is probably what people who live with their kids full-time do. 

Tomorrow I’m taking them to SunSplash water park. They’re thrilled, even though I have threatened to take this opportunity away from them seventy-five times in the last three days. I’m bringing my book because I’m delusional. I see how in the olden days moms used to buy their kids passes to these types of parks, and drop them off in the morning with a verbal warning to stay away from people who look like Kevin Spacey and enough money to buy a candy bar for lunch.

I have another horrible thing to admit: I’m in the process of quitting vaping. I know, gross. I started over the pandemic, and then I turned into one of those teenagers in the anti-vaping commercials, who rummages through all her shit to find her vape, so she could happily suck on this nicotine stick while pretending to take a shit on the toilet.

I have to eat nicotine lozenges, and when I feel myself turning into a short-fused asshole, I eat two. I lied to pretty much everyone I know that I picked up this filthy habit, and because I want to live to be over a hundred (I’m just like a tech-bro) I need to cut this shit out.

I’m unsure when I officially quit because it was a long time coming. It might be mid-May when I took the last puff from those adorable fruit-flavored little cubes of calming smoke producers, but also deadly fog that ravages your insides.

My kids think smoking is akin to prostituting yourself to support a meth habit, and that is why this will probably be the only blog post I delete when my kids turn sixty and decide they’d like to understand their crazy mother by maybe reading some of it. I would rather give them a list of my sexual history than ever admit that I vaped.

What sucks about not vaping? The surprising way that my clothes have shrunk. I told a friend of mine, I just need to get through a month or two of completely kicking the habit before I worry about the weight gain because I need to pick one battle at a time, and if I fixate on this extra five (maybe ten, FUCK) pounds then I will end up right back on that poisonous nicotine stick. This is another thing I could share with Geoffrey about fat-shaming for the sake of exerting dominance, it will make someone think cancer is worth the risk.

Anyways, to the women who do this full time, all the time, I really tip my hat to you. Summer vacation is a whole different level. I have no idea how anyone could homeschool their kid. I know I would turn into a shelf of a human which is probably why I’m divorced in the first place, a subconscious need to be alone kind of a lot. 

We’ll get our asses on a schedule, I’ll remember there are many factors at play when I process my emotions after walking into a destroyed kitchen, and I hate to say it, but after the kids’ dad gets back, they’re going on vacation with him for a week, and when things get overwhelming, I can always look forward to missing them.