Succinctly Yours Week 197: Not the Brightest Apple in the Barrel

Thank you to Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours! The purpose of this charming meme is to dip into the recesses of our creativity to retrieve a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer. The bonus word this week was “echo.”

The horror of Al's New Year's Eve party would echo for years. The decorations were sad, only the cat showed up, and bobbing for apples after 6 zombie shots was a bad idea. 140

Al’s New Year’s Eve activity was seeing whether apples echo. They don’t, but the fallout from viral online photos does.  100

Q: What do you call a guy with his head in a barrel of apples? A: Bob.  54

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things. ~Ray Bradbury

Improper Poll: New Year’s Resolutions!

People keep asking me if I’ve made my list of New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps it‘s a hint, but here‘s the thing. I’ve spent most of my life working on my worst faults. If whatever's left over isn’t fixed by now, it’s not likely to get there in one puny old year.

Besides, if this old dog is going to learn any new tricks, the reward had better be pretty big and juicy.

So I prefer either to think of resolutions for OTHER people…or else pick one easy thing for myself to do. I am happy to report that a few years ago, thanks to help from my daughter, I accomplished my resolution to overcome a Fear of Oatmeal. Want to know the secret? Here it is. First clear your mind of all thoughts relating to snot and boogers and paste and curdled throw-up. All clear, then? All righty! The secret is that you must pretend it’s a seriously undercooked oatmeal cookie.

Hoo boy, that was a lot of work! Frankly, I’m still working on it and have been too pooped to think of a new one till now. But here’s the new one I just thought of. I am going to scale back on my exclamation point use in personal correspondence.

Surprising, right?! I know!

I’m generally okay in public writing, but I am a closet over-exclaimer. And guess what one of my pet peeves is? You got it. I am a hypocritical, closet over-exclaimer. If I were editor of my own emails, they wound be bleed red ink.

Years ago, there was a book series that every high school girl carried. I won’t say the name of the series, but I once tried to read the first book and it was torture. The unnecessary exclamation points alone set my teeth on edge. It read like this:

I went down the stairs! I went into the kitchen! I sat down!

And that was it. Notice I am not exclaiming here, but I want to. Because what any idjut knows is that you just kept waiting for a creature to jump out and eat the narrator or anything at all that warranted those stinkin’ exclamation points, but there was nothing. Why we were supposed to be excited over the walking down the stairs and the sitting is still the biggest mystery of the book to me. I don’t think I ever finished it, either. Eventually all I could do was count those vile exclamation points.

So my fear is that people do that with my personal correspondence. Yet I once knew a woman—another writer and enthusiastic exclaimer—who used to hint that I must be depressed if I wasn’t exclaiming like a school girl. And I guess that’s what it comes down to. Like or not, in real life I have an exclaiming personality.

And after all, isn’t that part of what makes me who I am? Other than the anal retentive need to spell and punctuate text messages correctly? So on second thought, maybe a better resolution would be to ask my writing friends to forgive my over-exclaiming and be done with it.

By the way, happy New Year!!! Do you have a resolution for yourself or others?

Not Your Father’s Grandma

I have to admit that aging is made easier for me thanks to my heroes. My heroes are those women I run into everyday who are amazing, dynamic, fun human beings in addition to being older women. I just recently met two of them.

While Christmas shopping, I stood behind one of them in the long, long bathroom line at the department store. She looked a little like a jeans-clad Auntie Em. “I say we storm the men’s room,” she announced, elbowing me conspiratorially. “We can do it if there are several of us. Are you in?”

I laughed and nodded, but this was before I realized she was serious. “It’s not like I’ve never done that before,” she laughed. Well, me either, frankly. But I found out men get very upset when women go into their bathrooms, even though all of those stalls just sit there while we needlessly suffer. Go figure! But besides that, men’s rooms creep me out a little. That foreign wall décor is just icky….

My almost-partner-in-crime, Auntie Em, was a little miffed with me when she found out I was a wimp. That’s okay. She was still my hero just for thinking about it.

Then there was the woman I talked to at my hiking group. She had to be close to twenty years older than I am. In town visiting her mother, she said. The mother was in her nineties. The daughter, the hiking one, is a therapist, she told me. Still working, of course.

When she started asking questions about me and I told her I was divorced, she turned to study me for the first time. Her eyes took my breath away for a second. My mother’s eyes. Fierce eyes. Fiercely sharp and fiercely good, all at the same time. She pronounced me a “courageous woman” in a way that made me feel frightened and moved and oddly transparent. I like to believe that sometimes God sends people to deliver the messages we most need to hear. Courageous woman. I secretly carry these words like a totem, a gift from a wise Earth Mother, hug them close to my soul.

She told me about her various groups. Biking is over, she lamented, as is kayaking. And swimming of course. So she hikes. That was when I realized she had been slowing her pace to stay behind enough to talk to me, because I was starting to get a bit winded on the hills.

I know who I want to be like…when I don’t grow up.  Happy New Year!

That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weak. ~Erica Jong

The Eight Ball Again

OH, Great Eight Ball! Will 2010 be a good year?!?

"Signs point to yes." Whew. (Thank you, Becky, for letting me know that my picture wasn't very clear!)

Life isn't fair, but it's still good. ~Regina Brett

Not-So-Fun Thing for Losers to Do on New Year's Day:

Barf repeatedly.

I spent the first day of the new year curled in a fetal position in a nest of sorts made out of bathroom rugs piled under my toilet, with my head smashed against the tub, in between bouts of sickness spewing from various orifices. What I kept thinking is how you can really see new kinds of dirt from that perspective. Specifically, I was wondering how on earth black dog hair gets piled so thickly along my baseboards when my dog won’t go in a bathroom.

He was a rescue dog who had clearly been locked in bathrooms a lot as a puppy in his first home. Almost 13 years later, he still won’t go into a bathroom. But clearly, his hair will.

Anyway. It was a gastro-intestinal virus and not a hangover, I swear. I feel sort of ripped off. I’m really not a drinker these days. At first I’d thought it was my shrimp contribution to the dinner, but everyone ate some and no one else got sick. Plus the friend who hosted the get-together assured me that “stomach flu” is going around and her son had it not long ago. Bleah.

My dog was much more concerned about me than my daughter was. He even stopped by the bed several times to check my breathing by sniffing my nose and mouth with a worried look on his face. Big shock to open your eyes to a cold dog nose. Then he came and squeaked toys in my general direction. I couldn’t tell if this was a celebration of some sort or an assumption that I should play with him as long as I was breathing and all.

Today I can cross my house to put in a load of laundry without having to stop and lie down on the floor to rest several times on the way.

Here is what the Magic Eight Ball said, by the way. I did not drop it from a step ladder, but it still managed to be too bubbly to read the first time. I am for some reason compelled to shake it like it’s a can of V-8, even though as a 3rd grader my daughter instructed me in proper Magic Eight Ball consultation. “You have to wave your arms,” she said, “like this,” and she demonstrated a grand flourish. While doing this, she told me to say (with equal grandeur), “OH, Great Eight Ball! Please answer this question…!”

I consider it a good thing I couldn’t read it the first time, because I’m pretty sure the first word was “Don’t,” and that just doesn’t sound good.

So I tried again without shaking it up so much. This time it said, “Ask again later.” Wimp.

So I did. The third time was indeed a charm, especially since I’d recalled the proper procedure by then. I drew the words out and gave them lots of feeling, just as she’d taught me. “OOOHHH Great Eight Ball! Will 2009 be a good year for me?!”

So, it’s definitely official. 2009: “Outlook good.”

Hello Out There!

Welcome to my very first post, created on December 31, 2008. I would like to announce that I do, in fact, have plans this evening...I am crashing the private party of a couple of very nice neighbors of mine. But before I got the pity invitation, I thought these up. So here for your viewing pleasure are

10 Things for Losers to Do on New Year's Eve:

1. Climb onto a step ladder at midnight and drop an Eight Ball. While you’re up there, ask it if it will be a good year. If it isn’t broken, read the little window for your answer.

2. See if you can fit 2009 pieces of gum into your mouth.

3. Make a dragon face out of a paper bag. Glue curling ribbon streamers to the back and put it over your head, then skip through your house shouting, “Happy Chinese New year!”

4. At midnight, put Brendan Fraser wallpaper on your computer and neck with your computer screen.

5. Open a can of olives and arrange them on oyster crackers. Call them hors d’oeuvres and eat them wearing a little black dress and white gloves while sipping ever so delicately on orange juice poured into a plastic champagne glass.

6. Make up your own words to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” because who the hell knows what that means, anyway.

7. Make a list of things you will resolve NOT to do over the new year, such as “I will NOT sing ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ and mosh with my Christmas tree.”

8. Shake a can of Mountain Dew real hard and pop the tab at midnight.

9. Make a list of things for losers to do on New Year’s Eve.

10. Bang pots and pans at midnight. Ewww, no, I didn’t mean it that way, Scumbag.

Please feel free to add any suggestions of your own!