OMG – Stop Texting Me!!!

Last week we got our 10 1/2 year old daughter a cell phone. (If you don’t say the 1/2 part, she gets really mad!) Thanks to that, I now want to throw MY cell phone through a wall. Not because I am jealous that she has a better phone than I do…even though she does..damn you great deal when you add a new line…but because she texts me non-stop. That child texts me so much that I cringe when I hear my phone go off, and I had to give her a separate text alert sound so I could differentiate between her and my friends, who might actually have something important to tell me…as opposed to her.

Now before you start rolling your eyes and thinking “Why would you get your 10 1/2 year old a cell phone?”, let me explain. We did not just hand her a phone for no reason. She had to completely earn it. We made a deal with her back in September: She had to get straight A’s for the entire year, and she had to show responsibility by not misplacing her I-Pod at all. (Plus she is getting to that age where she isn’t at my side all the time, so it’s handy.) She kept up her end of the deal, so we kept up ours….and now it is coming back to haunt me…just about every 5-10 minutes of my life.

Here are some examples of what I get to read when I hear that ominous tone chime on my phone:

*Mom, thank u for getting me a phone. I <3 U!!!xoxo Ok – This was her very 1st text to me, so it made me smile. After that it all went downhill…fast. (By the way, her very first actual call HAD TO be to her father. Of course it did. Sigh.)

*Mom, I need my hula hoop right now! This gem came a mere 10 minutes after I dropped her off at school…even though I had just asked her before we left if she was going to need said hula hoop…and she said no.

* Where r u? I get this constantly. I usually get this 2-3 times while I am driving to pick her up at her friend’s house. (Thank God for text to talk!) More often than not though, the answer is “downstairs”. We don’t live in a mansion, so I don’t know how she thinks she will lose me in “the other wing of the house”, but whatever.

* I am almost there! Wow, am I glad she only had her phone for the last 3 days of school, because this is the text I got for the entire bus ride home. Literally stop by stop! It’s her little version of the play-by-play of her life. Meanwhile, I was already sitting at the bus-stop for like 10 minutes.

*This movie is great! U have to see it! I’ll go again, and not spoil it for u. Promise! She sent me this when she went to see Madagascar 3 yesterday. I told her she wasn’t supposed to use her phone in the theater, but the movie was SO GOOD that I just HAD TO know.

* Hi!!! Just another reason to use her phone. She has said “Hi!!” to me more in the past week than she has in perhaps her entire existence on this planet. If I had $1 for every “Hi!!!” I’ve gotten, I could probably buy myself something pretty decent.

*What r u doing? Maybe she thinks I’m doing something spectacular when I am not within her field of vision. I’m not. I really want to answer “Cringing because I just heard that friggin’ chime go off AGAIN!”, but I just answer with “Nothing. Just waiting for a text from you! ” I always have to follow that up with “What r u doing?” and she usually replies, “Nothing. Just texting you!” Sometimes she puts cute little hearts in there too, which makes it impossible to get mad at. She’s a smart cookie.

* K. This is where I had to speak to her. My daughter LOVES to send the answer “K” to my responses. When she asks me anything and I respond, this is what I get back in return…whether it applies or not. She was even responding “K” to my “K”. I had to explain to her that when I say “K”, she does not need to respond with “K”. It means “I got it and the conversation is over on my end!”…therefore she does NOT need to let me know that she too is done responding! She’s not really listening to me on that one yet. Maybe if I text it to her, she’ll get it.

Aside from her numerous texts, I also get lots of pictures that she takes…like close ups of my dog’s nose with “Isn’t he the cutest???” written under it…or pictures of her toes correctly labeled “My Toes!!!! ” God Bless this child and her new phone. I don’t know how she has lived this long without it, or how I have made it through my days without Instagram pictures from my own little Ansel Adams.

What I do know is her getting a cell phone is just another little piece of her “little girl-ness” evaporating. I think starting today, I will smile everytime that ominous chime goes off on my phone, because before I know it texting her friends will be a thousand times more fun than texting her mom is… and thought of that makes me cringe more than hearing that text alert tone ever will.

For the Girls With Curls

This is not my hair, but it might as well be!

Words that straight haired girls say: “I wish I had curly hair! You’re so lucky!”.

Words that most curly haired girls say in reply: “No, you don’t and no, I’m definitely not!”

I am a curly haired girl. In my lifetime, I have never once agreed with someone when they said that to me. In fact, I actually look at people like they are out of their minds when they say that (as I stare at their sleek, straight, beautiful hair in envy). Only girls born with curly hair understand the plight of what it’s like to have such a “blessing”. Have you ever seen the episode of Friends when they go on vacation and Monica’s hair turns into an afro? Yeah, it’s like that.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really care that I had curls. I was too young to understand that my hair was just unruly…and my mom could put it in a ponytail and twist it into a perfect Shirley Temple curl…which I loved. Then when I was about 9, she told me we were going for a “haircut”. Little did I know that my hair that touched the middle of my back was going to be cut into a pixie cut. I looked like a boy, and not a cute boy either. (Granted, I was a tomboy and never brushed my hair, so it was always a giant knot, but I’m still a little bitter about it. OK, I’m lying – I’m a lot bitter!) I hated that haircut so much that I stayed in the backyard with a woolen ski-cap on for 2 months. (I’m not joking!). I distinctly remember that it was during one of those 70′s heatwaves and I sweated my ass off, but that hat didn’t come off all summer. It was then that I realized that my curly hair was a curse, because that was one bad look when it started growing back….and that’s where the battle officially started.

My teen years were in the late 80′s, where big hair ruled. I was almost decent with that because I could make the top of my hair look like a giant wall, with enough Aqua Net to choke a horse. (By the way, I was about 5 inches taller then). The bottom was just curls turned dried out fuzz because no matter how hard I tried to brush the bottom out, that’s what I got. I look back at pictures and just cringe.

The straight haired girls seriously have no idea what it’s like to have curly hair. Their biggest gripe in life is “My hair goes flat!” I would have given a piece of a limb over the years to know what that felt like. They don’t know what it’s like to spend a half hour trying to smooth your hair with a blow dryer, only to walk 25 feet to your car, get in, and have a Zulu Princess looking back at you in the rear view mirror. It honestly goes south that quickly. They can have cute haircuts and semi-bangs. Anything even remotely bang-like on a curly haired girl is the devil. It’s the first thing that acts crazy. They don’t know what it’s like to have anxiety about going to an outdoor function on a humid day and having your hair scrunch up about 3 inches shorter than it was when you left the house. It never scrunches up nicely either because it has an evil mind of its own. They don’t know what it’s like to have to carry a hair tie with you at all times because there is a good chance it’s going to have to be pulled back at some point. They enjoy driving with the windows open…curly haired girls don’t…at least not this one!

I’ve tried everything…smoothing shampoos, deep conditioners, gels, mousse, using a curling iron to get them to be “normal” curls, hot rollers, air drying it, flat irons, and even once (way back) resorted to using a crimper. That was such an outright disaster that it’s painful to even remember that. None of them worked. Once someone even said to me “Maybe you should get a perm and it’ll soften your curls.” Gahhhhh a perm?!?!? That is just unthinkable. (Of course this came from a straight haired girl, because NO ONE with curls would EVER suggest such an atrocity!)

It took me 39 years to find my life changer…keratin treatments. It was like the angels in heaven sang to me the first time I had it done. Sure, I have to walk around for 3 days with my hair pin straight, and by day 3 you could lube a car with my head, but Christ on a donkey it is the best thing EVER when I wash it out. I can blow dry my hair in about 5 minutes WITH MY FINGERS and it is smooth, sleek, and beautiful. It’s not completely pin straight either…just nice! No curls or frizz in sight baby…not even if I go stand in the fog or mist! (I’ve done that for fun, just because I could!) It’s like a dream come true…at least for me it is. (And don’t go trying to destroy my dream with your formaldehyde comments either. The kind I use has none in it…and besides, I live in New Jersey – I’m pretty sure the air I breathe on a daily basis is worse for me than getting these treatments done twice a year!)

So there it is…this curly haired girl is finally happy with the hair on my head. Thank you keratin treatments! You have changed my life! I look the same all day as I do when I leave the house in the morning, I love anxiety-free outdoor functions, and I even drive with the windows wide open and my hair blowing in the breeze…and it feels so right….because it finally is!

PS – To this very day, I have “short hair” phobia because of that damn pixie cut. I’ll never get over it…never, I say!

Facebook Dissertations…

Facebook…an incredible tool of procrastination for me. I admit it. I know there’s plenty of other things I could be doing sometimes, but somehow I will drift over to Facebook for “just a few minutes”. However, “just a few minutes” in Facebook time isn’t exactly what it means in the real world…so yes, I am procrastinating.

As much as I love me some Bejeweled, and get a chuckle out of my friends statuses, there is one thing that completely turns me off on Facebook…debating. I will never understand why people do it.

Case in point…Being a “state worker”, being married to a “state worker” and coming from a long line of “state workers”, I do post some statuses about our wonderful Governor and what I think of his latest method of screwing us. Now, do I think everyone is going to agree with me? Of course not…we live in a Democratic society, so we all have our own political views. It’s what our great nation is founded on, for God sake! My peeve comes from people reading my status (or anyone else’s status – no matter what the topic is) and feeling the need to dig their soapbox out of its hiding spot and start their grand oration. Really people?

I just don’t get what makes someone feel they not only need to post their strong personal disagreement with it, but to then bust out their doctoral thesis on the state of the world in order to prove their point. No one needs to read your 3 paragraph dissertation on the “rightness” of your opposing view. Seriously.

I love it (not really) when it turns into a full scale debate when other people feel the need to hop into the mix too. Again, why? The world’s problems are not going to be solved by you, sitting in front of your computer in your jammies…it’s just not. If that was the case, the UN could just abandon their digs in NYC and everyone could just battle it out online.

I have to say that in all of the years I have been on FB, I have never once ripped anyone for their thoughts on their status, even if it is the most jackassed thing I have read all day. Why…because it is THEIR Facebook page…thus their opinion.

In a nutshell, if you feel the need to be the rightest person in Righttown …be my guest – just do it on your own page…that’s what it’s for!

Sympathy = Zero

I can’t help but chuckle at all of the people on Facebook and in the media lamenting Whitney Houston’s death. They all feel “so horrible” and “so sad” about her “untimely passing”. Well guess what? I don’t. Not an ounce of me feels bad and I refuse to apologize for my stance on this too.

I can credit my parents for my complete lack of sympathy for anyone who chooses to ruin their life with drugs. Growing up, my dad went out of his way every chance he got to not only tell us that drugs ruin people’s lives, but he would show us too. A few times a year, he would drive us over to the Bronx and let us see how other people lived. That was in the 70′s when the Bronx was in its poverty heyday. (Watch Fort Apache, The Bronx if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) He would drive us through neighborhoods where people had cardboard for windows, half of the buildings were abandoned, graffiti was everywhere, and junkies roamed the streets. He would slow down and say “Do you see that? If you do drugs, that’s how you are going to live! It’s pretty cold in the winter when you have cardboard windows”. He would drive us past the Bronx Detention Center, where I still remember the inmates being able to yell out the windows. He would say “They can’t go to a Yankee game like we are because they are locked up for drugs.” Drugs over the Yankees? Never!

He also taught this lesson close to home, every chance he got. He would comment every time we drove past the park by my house and saw people were sniffing glue out of paper bags. Again, he would slow down and say “Do you see that? If you want to ruin your life and be homeless, then sniff glue like that guy is doing! You will melt your brain and definitely won’t live in our house. You can live at the park with that guy instead!”. Living in the park with glue sniffers never sounded very appealing to me. Neither did cardboard windows or a half melted brain. In fact, all of his examples scared the sh*t out of me! Thus I never did drugs.

I don’t raise my daughter any differently than my parents raised me. This morning she came downstairs and asked if I was sad because someone named Whitney Houston died. I told her “Absolutely not!” and used it as an example of drugs completely ruining someone’s life. I told her all about what a great singer she used to be, and let her hear some of her songs. Then I showed her the picture in the paper of her from one day ago, all sweaty and drugged out, and told her that Daddy and I don’t have any sympathy for people who choose to destroy their lives and throw their gifts away, and neither should she! This isn’t a new topic for her. I have also let her see parts of Celebrity Rehab and Intervention so she can see what a disaster drugs are on people’s lives. I have friends that have told me that perhaps that’s a little much, but I don’t think it is. My parents went out of their way to make sure I never did drugs by showing me examples, and I hope for the same outcome by showing my daughter the same things every chance I get. I hope I am scaring the sh*t out of her, and that someday she does the same to her kids!

So there it is…my two cents. I’m not being holier than thou. If people want to destroy their lives using drugs, that’s their choice…but there will be no sympathy coming from me. I don’t feel sorry for Joe Schmo drug addict and I don’t feel sorry for Whitney Houston either.
PS – Thanks Mom and Dad!

Rant.Over.