Last year, I figured out what the hell an Advent calendar is. I’m a little slow on the uptake.

This will be the 11th Christmas I’ve ever celebrated. I still can’t, with any clarity, explain precisely what the role of the Easter bunny is in April, let alone grasp all of these weird little Yuletide nuances. In fact, I am fairly certain that, 11 years ago, Advent calendars did not exist at all, and that you, the Western world at large, are simply trying to fuck with me on as many levels as possible over the holidays.

That’s nice. Pick on the poor white trash cult-member kid every December. Stay classy, Western world.

Thanks to the Lord Almighty Twitter, the whole Advent Calendar thing clicked in my thick head last year and I decided that my children would be Scarred For Life if they did not have them. So I set out to procure for ourselves three lovely Advent calendars, a week into December.

My Christmas tree is full to the brim with little homemade ornaments all made out of clay or popsicle sticks, that all say, “Josh” and “197-something” on them. His mother kept everything, and we hang that everything on our tree every year. I came into this marriage with a dildo my dad gave me for my 18th birthday and one Cheshire Cat ornament that I didn’t even know was an ornament until somewhere around 2002. His mother, thankfully, has been catching me up by buying me, and all of us, a new ornament every single year, and more thankfully not one single instrument of penetration, but it’s not the same as having something old and handmade from your momma when it’s your turn to get drunk and breed in the backseat of a Nissan start a family. I wanted, want, my kids to have something that I lovingly slaved over for months and months, beside, um, their bodies, to pass down to their kids someday. To remember me by when I’m blowing off their family Christmas to drink drinks out of coconut shells on exotic islands with their father, because I’ll be damned if I’m not reclaiming our 20s in our 60′s, dammit. DAMMIT.

And so I turned to the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom in the universe today, Twitter, and not only found out what exactly the fuck an Advent calendar was, but (thanks to my friend pgoodness) how to make one. Myself. All crafty-like and good-motherly-ish.

And that I did. It took me weeks and all of my neighbor’s scrapbooking tools. I cut and measured and color-coordinated and spent more money than I’ll ever tell my husband, and they came together beautifully. And now I have two calenders that are both 98.26% done, and one that isn’t started yet, but everything is cut out and ready to go….

…and these, too.

Because there is a Target right up the street and I am significantly more Fartsy than Artsy at the end of the day. And, apparently, the one and only thing I can start and see through until the very end involves that ill-begotten dildo.

So my boys started a blog.

It’s not like I didn’t see it coming. I mean, I’ve had this thing for half of their lives. Of course, they didn’t know I had it until their father found out, which was more like 1/4 of their lives ago, but once they DID know, they were all over it.

At first, they didn’t quite understand what it was. And then they realized it was them, and they wanted to read it All. The. Time. And then they got bored of it, and then it became this big, running joke. “Oh, 2of3, you wish you didn’t do that! Mom is totally going to put it on her blog!” And then it became a competition. “Mom, put this on your blog! 3of3 was on there 5 times this month but you haven’t talked about me at all!”

And now they’re getting a little too old to e-cuddle and they really want to be on Facebook and I’ll let them do many various age-completely-inappropriate things but Facebook ain’t nevah gonna be one of them, so they did the one thing every child does best.

They did like I do.

They started a blog.

They had a co-conspirator some help. They have this little friend online who they got to meet in real life a few months ago and when that happened, grand and very expensive birthday parties were planned and blogs were forged out of marshmallow and flame. Or dessert was, either way.

The birthday party? Fat chance, kids.  The blog, however? Yeah, that just happened.

It’s 12:04 in the am. I am not even close to sleep. Why? Because I didn’t take a shower until 6 tonight and I’m now on my 18 millionth cup of tea and I am a moron. Someone really needs to invent a caffeinated beverage without the caffeine. Oh, wait….

So my husband walked in on me showering tonight. That’s not exactly true; he walked past the bathroom while I was showering and I can’t close the door to the bathroom because earlier today I decided it would be a fine idea to use the one bathroom in this house with a shower in it as a laundry basket and I haven’t washed the laundry in, like, 4 days which means I have a pile of laundry taller than Everest going over here and so the bathroom door won’t even come CLOSE to closing and I have a glass walk-in shower so yeah, he got a full frontal shot.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, really, I mean, we’ve been together since I was 20 and it’s not like he’s never seen me in the buff before (three times, to be exact) but when a man sees me in the shower, I fully expect the shower head to be ripped out of the wall at some point. That’s a fun story to explain to your landlord, by the way. What I don’t expect is for that man to go wandering past the door, see that it’s open, peek his head in and start talking to me while the floor is up to his knees in smelly preteen clothes, my youknowwhat’s are covered in Veet and my face is slathered in Noxema.

Not hot. Not close to hot. My shower head lives to see another day.

It probably shouldn’t have bothered me. It’s not like he hasn’t had to hold me up on the loo while I alternated puking and pooping as a person clawed his way out of what was, until mere moments before, his favorite toy in the world. It’s not like I don’t fart in my sleep. It’s not like I haven’t washed the sheets he completely destroyed during a particularly nasty bout of the roto-virus. It’s not like I don’t walk in on him every motherfucking morning while he takes his morning pee. In the nude. There really isn’t anything we haven’t seen each other do, I guess, but I just don’t want him to see me THAT exposed. Noxema exposed. It’s just soul-crushingly unsexy.

I never close bathroom doors when he’s not home because it’s usually just me and the 4 year old and she’s still at that phase where she wants to hold my hands and help me squeeze the poopies out. Even when all I have to do is blow my nose. It’s slightly annoying as all fuck. Wherever I go, there she is, and I accept that. 11 years of parenting has killed any hope of privacy or decency for me, and I embrace it. I don’t ever bother to close the door, which only bites me square in the ass on the days when my husband is home, and I forget, because he’s never home, and those are the days when I am sure to run up to the bathroom to do my thing and leave the door wide open, leaving me no choice but to jump up in the middle of certain events that don’t call for jumping of any kind and try to slam the door shut before those footsteps I hear coming up the stairs reach the top and he loses the last little inkling of attraction he may or may not have left for me.

So far, so good. And when he walked in the bathroom tonight, he said whatever the hell it was that was SO FUCKING IMPORTANT it couldn’t wait until I was done and then he walked out. Almost out. 90% of the way out before he turned around and said, “Oh, by the way, hot.”

That bitch is totally getting Dutch Ovened tonight.

I was born with the ability to play the piano. This is no surprise; my parents are, and I’m not kidding, two of the most gifted musicians you’ll ever meet. My father taught Jim Croce’s brother to play guitar, not kidding. All of us are musically inclined, whether or not we choose to use those skills. And hell, have you ever seen my fingers? They’re like pipe cleaners sticking out of dough, I tell you what. They’re made for three things….guitar, piano and masturbation. Thankfully or unfortunately, I can’t decide which, I was so indoctrinated with cultish visions of damnation and hellfire that one of those three was forever ruined for me.

As for the other two, I taught myself how to play guitar with a book full of Janis Ian sheet music and my 4th grade music teacher realized one day that I could just play piano. He taught me basic notes and chords and sent me home, and my mother handed me the sheet music to The Incredible Hulk and a dry erase marker for the piano keys and told me to have at it. A year later, I could really play the piano. It’s the ugliest thing in the world, watching me hammer away on the keys, but it sounds right and hell, I’m sure that Beethoven looked like an asshole when he played, too, but no one’s smacking him down for form today, now are they?

I am no Beethoven. I am no Elmo on a piano, but if I wanted to be, I probably could rock that shit.

For a while, I wanted to be. We had two player pianos in our house, side by side in our tiny living room, donated to us by our church in what I can only guess was a misguided attempt at keeping our little fingers busy with anything that didn’t involve our naughty places. I used to BEG my mother for lessons, but she refused on the grounds that we couldn’t afford it, which was probably true seeings how we only ate a few times a week, and no amount of the Rainbow Connection and church hymns filling the air would also fill our tummies, but it didn’t make me want them any less. I was very understanding of the whole situation, though. I’d sit while my bat-shit crazy grandmother who thought she could channel George Washington and make the dog levitate tried to teach me how to play the score from Oklahoma with her squeaky little voice that wasn’t completely unlike that shrimp from Poltergeist’s demon voice. I’d hammer out Suicide is Painless, which maybe wasn’t exactly the smartest sheet music to hand a suicidal pre-teen in hindsight, but bygones, until I got it right, and I still fall asleep with Ted Cassidy’s voice in my head, telling me about science gone awry and Dr David Banner’s struggles with elastic waist bands, muscle shirts and finding a nice shade of lipstick to compliment his earthy skin tone. Or something like that.

And then one day, after spending the better part of a year teaching my little brother to play the Pink Panther theme, my mother announced that she was getting him piano lessons because he was clearly gifted and deserved the extra help.

Cue head explosion.

I swore, SWORE, that no matter what my kids wanted to be in life, I’d make it happen. If they dreamed of being a world-class marathon runner, I’d put down the cigarettes and strap on the Nike’s and train with them. If they wanted to be carpenters, I’d hand them a hammer. And a bandaid. If they wanted to be starving musicians, I’d buy them their first Les Paul.

Of COURSE I ended up with the kid who’s only goal in life is to beat every level of Guitar Hero and then become, not just a professional, but a sponsored skateboarder. I have a really hard time asking my husband for $8 when I need milk and bread, but I’m supposed to figure out how to get Element to pay my kid to skate? Christ on a goddamn cracker, yo.

The boy is dead serious. He will skate for someone, and well, and he’s not going to stop until this happens for him. Or he breaks his legs. Or he starves to death under a half pipe. Or he falls over backwards at the skatepark and hits his head so hard he cracked his Bell helmet all the way up the back. Oh, wait, that already happened, and it really didn’t stop him. It did stop any number of parts on me, however, but I think I’ve started breathing again and I seem to have a pulse, so I think I’ll recover. He thinks it’s pretty cool. Bastard. Bastard who now wears his helmet everywhere he goes, though, so I win.

Of course, I have these dreams of my boys winning Pulitzers and accepting Nobel prizes and graduating from Ivy League colleges but maybe that’s not in their cards. Do I want my kid to put everything he has behind skateboarding? Honestly, a little. Skateboarding is awesome. But there’s that grown-up in me that wants to tell him to have a “fall back” career, some “real” skill, something “substantial” to base his life’s dreams on. Because I didn’t even go to college and it’s taken me 34 years to even find a job that doesn’t require an apron. And if I want anything in this world, it’s for my children to know more than I did, to live better than I ever could have.

But my baby wants to skateboard, and I can’t deny that. I mean, look at that shit. It’s poetry.

God shield I should disturb devotion. So tomorrow, I’m packing these boys up and, under the guise of testing out the new Tony Hawk video game Ride, I’m lugging them down to San Diego to spend a weekend with His Holiness himself, Mr Tony Fucking Hawk. Because maybe I’d also like him to have a law degree, but I’d really much rather watch him have his dreams come true. And of all the things that matter to me, the fact that my kid knows I support him, in whatever, is the most important thing to me in this whole world.

Besides getting to meet Tony Hawk, of course. I’m kind of flipping out about that one.

A cautionary tale of love in the time of methadone

You can make a bomb out of any old thing you’ve got lying around the house, really, so long as you’re bored enough and have the right teachers in school.  Like my ½ of 11^th grade chemistry teacher, who was my older brother’s full-year grade 11 chemistry teacher, who actually was such an brilliant fucking genius that he was compelled to teach a depressed, bored, impoverished and abused adolescent how to make exactly such a kitchen-sink bomb, and that adolescent went on, ironically enough, to just about blow the entire damn kitchen up one day with a dollar bill, a splash of rubbing alcohol and some ovaltine.

That very teacher also supplied my brother with an impressive stash of contemporary art magazines, highlighting the wonders of the female form and calling into question everything we know about physics and the elasticity of the human ligaments.  That fact came to light after one over-zealous younger brother dared to traverse the dark abyss that was our attic, distracted only momentarily by the ‘Red Hots Candies Trap’ cleverly laid out at the entrance to said attic, and by Red Hots candy I, of course, mean ‘Huge Fucking Pile Of Sudafed’.  Said little brother came to eventually and ratted his brother out.  Dirty, drugged out snitch.

This information is quite important to keep in the back of your head before you travel. Especially on a budget. Because you just never know when someone is going to give you credit for being a whole lot smarter than you are and totally fuck you in the process.

Like if, say, you’re coming home from a long weekend away from the family and you decide to go with your two best friends in blog out sightseeing and to pick up some trinkets for the family.

And you get so lucky as to find your way into Trader Joe’s for the first time in your life, and you see the Mecca of Wine Racks that you’ve waited five years to see, ever since one night on an apartment stoop with an unforgivably cute boy who first introduced you to Chuck and his $2 glory

And so you pick up a bottle for old times sake and then grab a 6 pack of DogFish Head which is brewed in Milton, Delaware, so no one carries it but Trader Joe’s does and then you stop at Walgreens to get your kids their snow-globes. Because every time you travel, you get your kids snow globes. It’s an important tradition, like forcing unsuspecting men to take numerous photographs with you against their will. Or circumcision.

So you gather yea rosebuds and American booze and inexpensive tokens of your everlasting love and devotion and head to your airport of choice to fly home, this time bearing only photocopies of your immigration papers because Canada knew something you didn’t and tried to tell you to stay home, but you never listen, even when it sends Donald Sutherland to tell you for it.

And then you get to the airport, late, because, well, nature called.

That counts as nature, right? You get there late and the machine won’t let you check in at the kiosk so the very tall and disinterested in you entirely airport attendant asks you to see the lady behind the desk, but the lady behind the desk doesn’t want to see you, so she doesn’t. For a really long time. Like, excessively long. And then she finally takes your $20 and lets you check in, and THEN she tells you your bag is overweight. And you’re totally going to miss your flight. So you take out the fastest, heaviest items and she slides your bag through and as you try to re-pack them in your carry on you realize that Two Buck Chuck and DogFish head are both made of liquid and shit, you’re hosed. So you give the attendant your booze and wish her a happy day. And then you cry.

But you still have your kids presents, right? Right. Until you go through security and you totally get The Dreaded Bag Inspection and the guy comes up to you and says, “Ma’am, we have a problem.” And oh, how the tears begin to flow. Because he called you MA’AM and you’re thirtyfuckingfour for Christ’s sake, but whatever. He’d totally hit it. And that’s when he tells you that

Snow globes cannot, for any reason, come through security, because we have no way of knowing what’s in them.

And you think, um, well, Chicago is in those, moron, but you’re so over it that you, between poorly suppressed sniffles, say, “Oh, just take them already.” And then the security dude, thinking that maybe he has a chance or something, says,

I’ll make you a deal. I’ll keep the big ones, and you can have the little one.

Which does you a fat lot of good, seeing how you have THREE kids, but whatever, and what, are you saying I can blow something up a little bit? Grrr. So you take your one little non-threatening snow-globe and you go to replace the gifts. With $20. For two kids and a spouse. And you don’t have more than $20 because in Canada, you can only withdraw so much currency in one day or they lock your account and you had to pay for a hotel room and a cab ride and lunch and makeup (because you totally thought you’d done so well budgeting and shit, yo) (also, NORDSTROMS) and you couldn’t take out any more. At all. Period.

So you go home to your children with the 2 for $20 t-shirts they had at the Hudson News store that are not only hideous, they’re the size of Shaq, and nothing more than empty promises of laundry folding and blow jobs for your spouse, when in reality you won’t fold laundry for at least another month and as for the other thing, yeah, you’re spent.

But the kids love the shirts anyway and your husband loves that you thought enough about his feelings to lie through your damn teeth about sex and housework just to make him feel better and even though you lost your phone and your really good makeup brushes on the airplane so you can’t even use the new Trish McEvoy compact you’ve waited TWO YEARS to buy, you didn’t lose your BlogHer swag bag and guess what? Fuck the naysayers; that shit saved my ASS.

Neener, neener, indeed.