Surprise!

Ya know, the world continues to surprise me every day. And by "surprise," I mean "make me want to bang my head against a wall." Not in a violent way, but more like a wanting-to-get-dizzy-enough-that-this-makes-any-sense-whatsoever way. The ridiculous thing is that many of the things that surprise me actually surprise me on a regular basis, so I pretty much shouldn't be surprised by them, and yet when they happen, there I am standing around with my mouth hanging open, going, "Whaaaaa?"

Not Hannah's List of Surprising Things That Shouldn't Surprise Her Anymore:

1. Christians who are confused by non-Christians who think Jesus was way cool. It's weird to me that folks who worship a deity don't seem to believe that deity is worthy of any sort of consideration by anyone other than those who worship him. I mean, Jesus is a fairly influential person by historical standards, being that he is pretty much responsible for a Jewish sect that has shaped the world. That aside, many of his teachings in the Gospels are both universal and sound: take care of your neighbors, worry about your own soul instead of somebody else's, don't run around judging folks. I would say that those are bits of advice that all people on the face of the planet would do well to live by. In fact, I would go further and say that if every person on the face of the planet truly lived by those rules, then the crap we have to deal with (from the failing economy to abortion to war to a compromised food supply) would not exist. How could it? The truth is that most people (at least the onesI know) don't choose a non-Christian path in life because of problems with Christianity's central deity. The problems arise with the leaders and believers who choose to willingly be hypocrites while practicing a religion whose central deity had nothing but contempt for hypocrites. Please note that I'm not making a blanket statement here; clearly, not all Christians are hypocrites. Unfortunately, the ones who are seem to have the loudest voices and biggest wallets.
   
2. The jelly on processed meat products. I mean, it's just gross, right? Where does that jelly come from? No, don't tell me. I really don't want to know. I'm going to pretend that it's nature's way of protecting it from alien invasion. (OMFC, what if it IS an alien invasion?)
   
3. Christians who don't believe that non-Christians pray or believe in prayer. A connection with a deity or entity worthy of worship, be it Yahweh or Allah or Ra or Brigid or the Filing Cabinet, pretty much relies on prayer to forge that connection. Linguistically, one can find prayer that existed tens of thousands of years ago. Over a million years ago, people used stones as prayer objects. People, it would seem, are born to pray. Of course, not all non-Christians pray, but many of us do, and we do so with the idea that our prayer will be heard by an entity who will do something with the energy we are directing at it. Otherwise, we'd all just be talking to ourselves or wasting our candles. And you KNOW how we feel about misusing petroleum products.
   
4. The Georgia Bulldogs not being able to correct the same problems they've had all year long. This season has been disappointing, to say the least, and yet every game I'm THERE, wearing my red and/or black, making finger foods, telling the players that I believe in them. (We have a psychic connection.) But by the second quarter, I'm usually surfing the internet or curling up for a nice long nap to get away from the horror of interceptions and eighty million penalties. We're going to the Kentucky game with Jeffrey and I swear, I don't think I can bear it if we lose. Seriously. It might require therapy.
5. Conservatives who believe that liberals want to take away rights. This is insane to me. I just have no idea how this idea came around. The only "right" that liberals want to take away from people is the "right" to deny other people rights. If somebody else can come up with a right being removed by liberal legislators, I'd love to hear it. While you're at it, please let me know what "rights" conservatives are protecting.
6. Carrie Prejean continuing to play the shameless victim. The girl got her boobs paid for, posed for semi-nude photos, and apparently made a video of of herself masturbating and yet she's still rocking the "the liberal media is so mean to me" angle. The things she did are not, for me, particularly disturbing. However, I'm thinking they SHOULDN'T jibe with the religious right wonks who are using her as an example of all things good and holy. EXCEPT--the wonks keep using her, which is even more surprising. You can almost hear their thought process, "But she's so prriiiddddyyyyyy. She looks like an annngggeeellll. And she doesn't like gay people, so WOOHOO!" Frankly, those folks ought to consider leaning a little harder on Kirk Cameron's shoulder. He's been in "Tiger Beat" AND knows Alan Thicke AND apparently is good at playing firemen. Everybody loves firemen.
7. The number of applications I have to keep hiding on Facebook. I mean, I am thrilled that you saved a cow or bought a fish or received a heart or killed a dude in Cuba. Rock the frick on. Follow your bliss. But I don't want to know about it every time I log on and I swear, there is a new application I'm hiding every day. Today, I hid some kind of wedding thing, a God Wants You to Know (Really? God is using FB now? Can you FAN God? Add him as a friend? Can you send God a sparkly heart?) thingy, and another frickin' fish application. How many fish applications are there, for the love of Pete? WHY are there so many? (If you use these applications and love them, I hope I haven't hurt your feelings. I still think you are a SUPER person and hope that you become the ruler of Farmville--which is totally a communistic game. Just saying.)
8. Stinky mushrooms. What the hell, Mother Nature? Not only do I have to worry about River eating them, I now have to worry about Jeffrey getting them on his shoes and then losing his ever-loving mind over the smell. And washing his hands. And sniffing his fingers until I want to fall down in a heap and moan a bit.
   
9. Glenn Beck.
   

Giving the Joy

This weekend, Mama and I took the kids to a wedding in Knoxville. Before the ceremony, we stopped at a grocery store in a sort of rundown part of the city. The store was the coldest store I have ever been in in my entire life and River demanded to be carried because of it. We promised Jeffrey he could pick out a Hotwheel to have if he behaved during the ceremony and reception. Then, of course, both kids wanted a snack and they had to pick out a snack and no, they couldn't have candy and what about these crackers and...it wasn't a Hell-Mart moment, but it came close, especially when I told the cashier that I didn't need a bag and she said, "Okay" and then put my stuff in a bag. Nice.

Anyway, we got out to the car, got the kids strapped in and as I was getting ready to close my door, I heard a voice say, "Do you have children?"

My first thought was, "Omalawsy, is he really going to use my kids as a ploy to get money?"

I turned to look at the man standing next to my door: ragged clothes, fedora jauntily askew, lined face looking eagerly at me.

"Um, yes," I said.

"Are they smart?" he asked.

Was he selling me books or something? Those book-selling folks were scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one.

"Yes, they are," I answered, struggling to be polite, waiting for the request.

"Your license plate says 'RSK.' Really smart kids!"

Blink. Blink.

Just like that, I was smiling. "How about that?"

And then his face, looking so intently for my smile, broke into a toothless grin of its own. We just BEAMED at each other in the parking lot.

Then we wished each other well and went on our separate ways.

Driving to the wedding, Mama and I discussed how both of us had such negative first impressions of the old guy and how it was sad that our world had gotten into such a state.

I've thought about that particular interaction a lot over the last two days. I've asked myself, over and over, "How much joy do you bring into others' lives?"

I love to make folks laugh. My brand of humor, though, isn't the kind that brings joy, necessarily. It's too sarcastic, too interested in pointing out the absurd. I'm not knocking it, of course, because lots of times, it's either laugh at the crapstorm or get buried under it.

But joy is different, isn't it? Joy can erase a bad mood, warm a cold day, keep you going in a moment when you'd rather give up. And it takes so little (particularly on crapstorm days) to make you joyful. And I think it takes so little to give a little joy.

I'm still mulling this one over, still trying to figure out exactly what it means to me. I know that I'm thankful for my tattered little messenger and his smile that came exactly when I needed it. I know I want to try to bring more joy to the people around me--and prevent their joy from being robbed.

So I'm wondering...what brings you joy? How do you give it to others?

Hell-Mart and Princess Bad Biscuit

This post was totally supposed to be a list detailing my feelings about NaBloWriMo, Halloween, NaNoWriMo, and the state of my house following the first wave of the visiting season. But then I went to Hell-Mart and such was the sheer head-exploding horror of that trip that I need to write a post about it. For therapy's sake. Or so that when Will comes home and the living room is all filled with exploded head, this post will remain as an explanation and warning.

So, I hate Hell-Mart. I hate it so much that I'll go ahead and call it out: I hate WAL-MART. Hate it. Hate the crowds. Hate the rush to jam holidays down our throats. Hate the fact that the prices are so low and the corporation treats its workers so foully.

Although let me go ahead and say this: with the exception of maybe five people, the workers at our local Hell-Mart seem to be hired solely on the basis of how crappily they can treat their customers. The ability to look disdainfully at the person paying your salary by buying your products is clearly high on the list of qualifications. As is eye-rolling, sighing, and tooth-clucking. And let me tell you, after today, if I get tooth-clucked at by another Hell-Mart employee, I might use the clucker's tongue to strangle her. Just saying.

I hate the place and every few months I declare that I am never going in there again because it just sucks and when I go in there, I feel like a bad person. I scowl. I make unpleasant remarks to little old ladies in the parking lot. It is a place of evil, I tell you. But it's CHEAP, yo. And since I'm on a budget, I need the cheap. So when I realized today that I needed a few cleaning supplies and hair brushes, I loaded the kids up and set off for my least favorite place on the planet.

Things went well at first. I gave River one of the cloth shopping bags to carry (yet another reason for the hate: the cashiers look at my cloth bags as if they are made out of horse poop, which they totally aren't) and we found the brushes and body wash and were doing great. Next stop was toys for Jeffrey's Hotwheel reward and for some flashcards, because cool daddy seems to have missed out on a lot of basic math facts over the last few years. Seriously, watching him add eight and seven is watching a five step proposition, with lots of borrowing and rounding and calling out to the gods of arithmetic.

All was going well and then, I saw the tubs. Which would turn out to be The Tubs of Hideous Destiny.

I have gathered enough Autumn and Halloween decoration stuff that it seems time to separate the Halloween and Easter stuff, which currently share space in the same tub. My Halloween stuff is generally of the pumpkin and fake spider variety, but I have a feeling the little Easter bunnies cower in a corner of the tub during the long cold winter, whispering to each other that there is safety in numbers.

What?

Right, the tubs. So there was one of those seasonal tub displays: all pumpkiny orange and purple and black and silver, for some reason. I saw them and I was all like, "Excellent! I can separate my two inappropriately grouped holiday decoration families!!" I grabbed an orange tub and its lid and herded the kids toward the cleaning products.

Here's where things start to go awry. River will be three in January, a state of being which apparently means that she has to be as big of an ass as possible. Don't get me wrong: she's still frickin' precious and I adore her, but she is on my last nerve. "No" is her most favorite word, she has developed the charming habit of hitting people or throwing things when she doesn't get her way, she fake cries for HOURS if even vaguely offended. It is a laugh riot, y'all.

For some reason, the words "cleaning products" trigger in her the inability to not touch every single product on every single shelf, can I get an AMEN? If it was for sale, she was going to touch it. Also? She would stand in the middle of the aisle and watch people walk right up to her with her cart. They'd say, brightly, because she's so frickin' precious, "Excuse me, honey!" And she would just STARE SOLEMNLY at them, occasionally shaking her head. Not embarrassing at all, my friends, especially as I tried not to drop the unbalanced tub while chasing her through the store. (Jeffrey, in the meantime, was as good as gold, bless his precious heart.)

After several of those Mommy Moments you have when you crouch by your kid and outline through clenched teeth and in graphic detail the hell to come if she doesn't straighten up, I got all my stuff to the checkout line. I explained (for the billionth time, I swear) about the cloth bags, I loaded everything into the tub (including the one bottle of cleaner the cashier insisted on putting in a plastic bag) and put the lid on it.

At least, I tried to put the lid on it. But the lid didn't fit. Awesome. I hauled River away from the Halloween sale displays and went off to search for the lid. And GUESS WHAT? None of the lids at the display fit my tub. In fact, the whole lid/tub dynamic was all screwed up. Starting to sweat, I tried to find a Wal-Mart worker.

Worker one was going on break. He suggested I go find another display.

Worker two actually walked away from me when I asked for help. Maybe River fake crying and dangling from my hand like a tiny, loud ham threw her off.

I said out loud, "I hate this place."

Finally, I found an assistant manager. You'd think assistant managers would be less ass-hatty, wouldn't you? But noooooooo. He was so exasperated at having to stop stocking that end cap. His eyes rolling out of his head, he suggested I go to the tub area ("You know, that big aisle with all the plastic stuff?") and find a lid that fit. Just any old lid. You know.

I dragged the kids to the plastic stuff aisle and Jeffrey and I started flinging lids around. I began loudly declaiming about the inanity of the tub and lid organizational system. Jeffrey said (Y'all, he was a PEACH at Hell-Mart. He was the only thing that kept me sane.), "I know, Mama. This just doesn't make any sense."

Guess what? No, really. Guess. THAT'S RIGHT. No lids fit that damn tub. Not a one. I almost fell over in the aisle amid all the plastic.

Back to the cashier. While River ran in circles around the checkout area, the cashier explained to me that because I'd already paid, I had to go to customer service (HA! Irony!) to get a refund. I apologized for telling her exactly what I thought of Hell-Mart policy and then Jeffrey and I put the tub between us and headed to customer service. River fake cried and tried to hit me as I refused to let her run away from me.

At customer service, I stood behind a man who had never, ever in the history of his lifeworn deodorant. And bathing was not a priority for him either. Of course, when I got to the counter, I had to let go of River and tell her to sit down at my feet. She said, "No." And then, when I picked her up, she...y'all. Omalawsy. She rared back and slapped my face.

Listen. We don't hit in our house. I don't spank River. I don't spank Jeffrey. Jeffrey no longer hits as a matter of course. So when my two-year-old bad biscuit of a daughter slapped me, my head exploded.

The customer service lady did that thing where a person's head snaps back at another's expression and she handed me my money and said, "Ooh, girl. I KNOW." I sorta wanted to kiss her on the mouth, just because she was understanding of the horror of my shopping trip.

I took off River's sunglasses and watch ("Nooooo! No, give me dem BACK!") and told her that she could earn them back when she could act nicely. I am trying to reinforce positively, y'all. I'm reinforcing positively like a madwoman. But River? Not so much buying the positive reinforcement. Ugh.

In retrospect, I'm sure that part of the issue was that Hell-Mart's evil vibe was rubbing off on my tired, over-stimulated toddler. She was also probably feeding off my frustration with the inanity of the tub/lid nightmare. (Gah. Two-year-olds are such psychic vampires.)

So I have vowed, once again, never to return to Hell-Mart. I will continue to mix my holiday decorations for the rest of my life, terrifying stuffed bunnies for decades, before I step foot inside that den of iniquity again.

The bad biscuit is another story. I've gotten so far as to vow not to lock her in her room until she graduates from college. More immediate suggestions on how to make her not be such an ass are welcome. (And, in fact, longed for. Pleasehelpme.)