A Rock To Tie A String Around

It’s dangerous to be a kid now. I’m not just talking about the pollution, imminent water crisis or threat of terrorist attacks; I’m talking all the developmental and psychological disorders that seemingly didn’t exist when I was a toddler. Now, I’m not being so naïve as to say that they didn’t actually exist then, or that they’re made up now – what I am saying, is that if I was a toddler right now, my mom would have been in serious trouble.

My son, Mr. Adorablepants, is something of a lone wolf, of course – he’s two, so it’s sorta hard to tell if that’s an actual personality trait or one I’m just wishing upon him. I’m kind of a lone wolf in my waking life; I don’t ‘hang’ out with people unless they happen to be The Husband or Mr. Adorablepants.

So when Mr. Adorablepants’ daycare lady told us we should get him checked out because he likes to play by himself, my first reaction was “pfffttt….good.” Then later that night in an insomnia driven panic, I started looking up symptoms.

I should have stopped at ‘pffftttt….good’ I have currently found several developmental and psychological disorders that I’m pretty sure both Mr. Adorablepants and myself would be diagnosed with. Of course, the big scary in this is Autism. When someone tells you they’re afraid your kid is spending too much time by himself and he isn’t socializing properly, they’re pretty much hinting that he might be Autistic. After looking up the symptoms, I’m pretty sure I’m Autistic – which is actually a hopeful diagnosis….I mean really, it hasn’t really bothered me so far.

The symptoms are all over the chart – I picked a few of my favorites:

• Seems to be deaf at times.
• Seems to hear sometimes, but not others.
• Throws intense or violent tantrums.
• Has odd movement patterns such as flapping arms or shaking body, especially when excited.
• Seems hyperactive much of the time; is always “on the go.”
• Is often uncooperative or oppositional during daily routines.
• Seems to prefer to play alone.
• Gets things for him/herself only without asking for help.
• Is very independent for his/her age.
• Seems to be in his/her “own world.”
• Seems to tune people out.
• Repeats what he/she hears rather than using words on his own.
• Is a very picky eater. May eat only 3 or 4 different foods.
•

http://teachmetotalk.com/2008/03/14/could-my-toddler-be-autistic-signs-of-autism-in-toddlers/

I’m no doctor, but this seems to describe pretty much every toddler I know. It actually describes me with the exception of the picky eater and the fact that any hyperactivity I might express is caffeine driven. So I kept looking.

• Social withdrawal
• Hostility or suspiciousness
• Deterioration of personal hygiene
• Flat, expressionless gaze
• Inability to cry or express joy
• Inappropriate laughter or crying
• Depression
• Oversleeping or insomnia
• Odd or irrational statements
• Forgetful; unable to concentrate
• Extreme reaction to criticism
• Strange use of words or way of speaking

http://helpguide.org/mental/schizophrenia_symptom.htm

Maybe we’re Schizophrenic….I mean, I make odd statements pretty frequently, and just the other day Mr. Adorablepants ran up to me and declared ‘Dinosaur Rawr! Bear Duck!’ then laughed hysterically. This actually covers ‘Odd or Irrational Statements’ and ‘Inappropriate Laughter’ and ‘Strange Use of Words’. Three strikes……

Keep on googling symptoms….sleep with come (see ‘insomnia’ above):

• get distracted easily?
• have difficulty concentrating on one thing at a time?
• tend to be disorganized?
• have a hard time focusing or paying attention during conversations, listening to others, or while reading?
• often forget things like appointments or obligations?
• have trouble following directions that have multiple steps?
• have difficulty starting and finishing projects?
• tend to procrastinate?
• have trouble prioritizing information?
• get impatient easily?
• often feel restless and antsy?
• lose track of time and have trouble with time management?
• often misplace or have difficulty finding things at home or at work?
• act before thinking through consequences?
• speak or blurt out before thinking about the impact your words will have on others?
• tend to have lots of racing thoughts?
• get bored easily?
• tend to make careless mistakes when you have to work on a tedious or difficult project?
• take risks frequently?

http://add.about.com/od/evaluationanddiagnosis/a/adultaddsymptom.htm

Oh dear, I think I have ADD, I’ll leave Mr. Adorablepants out of this one, he always remembers his appointments and hardly ever procrastinates. Now I’m not so worried about Adorablepants, but I’m pretty sure that they wrote this list by tailing my movements for a week.

Of course, there are other options…..I am pretty thirsty, I hope I’m not diabetic, and the next time I have headache, fever and stomach pains I’ll be googling Ebola before the weakness sets in…..

My point is this – diagnosis should not be left to the Internet. After a long night of google, I have decided that Mr. Adorablepants is a completely normal two-year old and diagnosed myself with Attention Deficit Autistic Schizophrenic Diabetic Ebola. I don’t know what the cure is, but I think it has something to do with turning off the computer and going back to bed…..

Recently, I received the best catalog EVER in the mail. Ever. I’m not being hyperbolic; it really is the best catalog in the whole entire universe…at least for a writer. It wasn’t one of those Brookstone catalogs that illustrate 10,000 different ways to massage yourself, the Discovery Store catalog with giant maps of solar systems and volcanic ranges….it wasn’t even one of those catalogs from the airplane that sells things like motorized cat shampooers and hands free bread slicers. No, it was a clothing catalog from Deva….never heard of them until now, but they are awesome, not so much for what they sell, but how they sell it.

So, friends, it’s another contest….yes, it’s true, because I’m in a constant state of ass broke, you won’t win anything of any particular value. But as with my previous prizes, I promise that once I make a purely subjective decision as to the winner, I will pick a random object from my house and once you pony up your mailing address…you may be one cat richer…I mean one badly scratched copy of Benjamin Franklin DVD richer….either way, it’ll be fun.

So, here are the rules: I provide the pics, and my own commentary on events happening therein, and you top me with your own captions, or account of what’s happening in that photo. As the winner will be chosen entirely subjectively by me and me alone, you can comment on one, two or all of the photos….the one who makes me laugh the hardest…wins.

Here we go:

Is it just me or does the female model look a little nervous? And not just because she’s wearing the same outfit as her stalker….I mean boyfriend. The make model has a bit of a ‘if I can’t have you…..’ gleam in his eye, I just bet she was glad the whole Deva crew was there on the dock that day….

Next in the series of creepy male models is this guy, who I like to call ‘I showed up to work drunk but I’m really, really trying to keep it together…I’ll just keep staring at her boobs…it’ll be okay, things will stop spinning….’

Ever wanted to fly a kite with your beloved, while wearing identical all natural cotton fiber unisex shorts? Here’s your chance, but back off ladies, this guy’s taken…rawr.

While I really want to mock their tunic shirts; I’m horribly distracted by the female model’s GIANT HAND. It’s a trick of the camera, I’m sure, or is it?

Ever wanted to get away from the cult for a day and walk on the beach? I do, but what would I wear? Why this stylish and not at all weird body length robe gown. The real question is what do you wear under it? Rawr.

So, you have some friends coming over, the friends the cult leader have assigned to you anyway, you’ve made a fresh batch of Kool-Aid and you want to look your best. Try these unisex backyard robe gowns, they are awesome. Disclaimer – not available in fuchsia until you’ve reached the seventh level of vibrational power in accordance with the sun path back on the home planet. Sorry.

So there ya are friends. Remember the more times you enter, the more opportunities you have to win an old textbook from my shelf, or a discarded spoon I found in the silverware drawer.

If anyone is in bigger trouble than Mel Gibson lately, it’s his BFF Whoopi Goldberg. You’ve all seen the stories, Whoopi is in some seriously hot water for stating that he couldn’t possibly be a racist because he’s her friend and he’s hung out with her kids. Uh huh.

It’s not a new trend for Whoopi, she’s a good friend to have if you’re an overprivledged asshat. She’s come to the defense of Roman Polanski (definitely not rape-rape, just a little bit of rape, which is totally different) and Ted Danson back in 1993 when he showed up to the Friar’s Club in blackface. Whoopi’s story back in ’93 was that the Friar’s Club guests should have been prepared for tasteless comedy because it was a roast. Personally though, I think Mel Gibson takes the cake. Whether they’ve been edited or not, it’s clearly a panting, psychotic Mel Gibson who is channeling his own personal Thunderdome as he spews words that I won’t even repeat here in a quote.

Here’s the thing though, Whoopi’s not the only one. I’m not talking about Mel, or Roman Polanski, or Ted Danson. I’m talking about all the times we’ve defended, ignored or pretended not to hear someone close to us make a racist, sexist or homophobic comment. Whoopi’s getting all the press because she has an audience, and indisputably she’s doing a whole hell of a lot more than just ignoring or pretending not to hear. What possessed her to jump into the fray and defend Mel Gibson in a time like this is the same compulsion that most of us have had at some point to justify why we’re friends with morons.

It’s embarrassing. You’re stuck standing next to stupid and by default anyone within earshot thinks you’re an ignorant bag of crap too. Our first natural reaction is to come up with something, anything that will make it okay to be that person’s friend. Something that will tell the world ‘Hey, he wasn’t always like this…he used to be cool, back before we talked about politics…’

It’s not necessarily untrue either, sometimes you get to see ugly bits of people that you didn’t know existed after the statute of limitations on friendship has already passed. You’re staring at the person who drove two hours out her way to pick you up when your car died in the middle of the night, the girl who bought you groceries when you were down to your last saltine cracker, the one who showed up right at the right time with a bottle of wine, a quart of ice-cream and a zombie movie after you were dumped. You love this person. You love this person, but you had no idea that they were a moron until they pulled to your house with a ‘Where’s The Birth Certificate?’ bumper sticker.

Is this what Whoopi’s doing? I don’t know. I know I’ve done it. A few years back The Husband and I were back home for the holidays and eating with some extended family. The Husband and I were vegetarians back then…we’ve since fallen off the wagon….thus when the ham was passed around, we politely declined. Extended Family Member #1 looks at him and says:

‘What? You some kind of Jew?’

To which The Husband answered:

‘Well, yeah, but I’m also a vegetarian.’

It got very quiet. Until the football game came on, and Extended Family Member #2 piped up with the really hilarious joke that the players only thank their mothers when they win because none of them have any fathers. Hilarious right? Ugh.

But did I say anything during this whole dinner? No, I didn’t. Maybe it was because I knew we were going to leave soon and not see them for a long time. Maybe it was because my mother was right there, and while she hates asshats, she hates fights at the dinner table during the holidays even more, especially when they’ve been started by her daughter.

Does it matter though? I still didn’t say anything, I didn’t use any of the great retorts that I thought up after the fact, I didn’t tell them to stop being jackasses, nothing. I politely ate my macaroni salad.

Where does our responsibility to call people out on their asshattery start? And even if we do, does it do any good except to absolve us of responsibility? I want to think that it does do some good; I want to think that if we all became intolerant of hate filled speech, it would create an atmosphere where the morons would think twice. But would it make them change their minds? I don’t know. Is a silent moron better than a loud one?

So the big breaking news here in LA is that the Grim Sleeper serial killer has finally been caught after twenty-five years and thirteen known murders. So named because it took the police so long to track him down and there were huge gaps between the crimes, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was, according to all the newscasters, a perfectly normal guy who liked to watch comedies and had his grandkids over all the time, or so the neighbors said on the news all night.

I’m pretty sure my neighbors aren’t serial killers, but it makes me wonder. What exactly would I say if one day I saw them being carted away and then I was swamped with news crews? What would they say if the same thing happened to me?

So I spent the bulk of my day in a state of hyper paranoia, mostly imagined and used for the sake of wasting time, trying to calculate if I would be the neighbor who had spent the last twenty-five years having coffee with a serial killer, or if I would be the one, the badass from the crime movies who saw through his friendly veneer all that time ago and all by myself cracked the case and ended up in a high-speed car chase….or running for my life through craggly sewer tunnels…..yes, those images are a mixed bag of every Law and Order episode I’ve ever seen.

Here’s what I came up with: Just for the sake of the visual – keep in mind my neighbors are a 65-70 year oldish Scottish couple:

Not My Actual Neighbors...These Are Stunt Doubles...

1. They Tried To Kill Me With Their Car:

It’s true. A few months ago I was driving west and getting ready to turn right onto our street. They had been driving east and were stopped in the middle of the road trying to turn left onto the same street. Instead of letting me go first, as I my god given right of traffic….they just barreled across the intersection and nearly sideswiped me.

Not knowing what was happening initially, I yelled….I have no horn in my car so whenever I need one I let out an ineffectual little yelp.

So I yelled to myself, the neighbors threw up their hands and we all proceeded to our respective driveways. Uncomfortableness ensued. Neighbor got out of his car and looked at me like I had tried to run him off the freeway, then he said:

“Didn’t you see it was us?”

Again, Not My Actual Neighbor...But This Is The Exact Face He Gave Me

Okay neighbors….are the traffic laws different if I recognize the driver of the car? Really people?

2. They Pay Way Too Much Attention to My Garage:

One night, around 9pm, we heard a knock on the door; it was the female half of the neighbor couple.

“I can see a faint light in the garage, do you think you left a light on in there?”

Not thinking anything strange, I shrug; open the garage door, and no light. I thank her for her concern, and she goes back to her house.

The next night is the same thing. I explain that there’s no light on in our garage, it’s okay, don’t worry about it. She reluctantly leaves.

Finally, The Husband hung curtains in the garage to block out the prying eyes – not like there’s much in there, but we thought it might keep them off garage light watch duty.

It didn’t work. The next night, she asked us if we had meant to hang curtains over the garage window.

Actually....This Might Be My Neighbor....Not Sure....

Yes, yes we did.

3. They Think I’m a Lousy Gardener:

I’ve come home from work four times now to find male half of the neighbor couple weeding and pruning my front lawn….just puttering around, working away.

I should be grateful, after all, I have had absolutely no luck getting flowers to grow, and the few, small green plants I have been able to sustain just stare out from our garden sadly wishing that someone would steal them and transplant them to a place where their owner knew what to do with them.

Again, Can't Be Sure....This Looks An Awful Lot Like Neighbor...

But still….it doesn’t look that bad. Maybe neighbor is just retired and bored; maybe he’s concerned about his property value wilting along with my bluebells.

As for what they would say about us? I better hope I’m never falsely accused of anything, I have a sick feeling that they would be the first ones in that witness box telling the jury about my shameful waste of light bulb energy in the garage and my rampant abuse of flowers. I don’t even want to get into what the can and bottle guy hauls out of our recycling bin every week…..

Yikes.

My point is this, I hope no one out there ends up on the nine o’clock news talking about how they played chess with a serial killer for the last ten years. I’m not sure how I’d ever trust my judgment again. I’m grateful for my neighbors, I’m pretty sure that they’d be the first ones to call the fire department if I ever so much as let a whiff of smoke escape from my kitchen, and even though they did try to kill me….I’m about 89% sure they haven’t buried anyone under their porch….the other 11% is skeptical….