10 Deeply Insulting Ads That Show Up on My Facebook Homepage

1. Wrinkle creams. These ads have been there since I first signed on to Facebook. But from this very first one, I’ve wondered if there is an actual, human Wizard of Ad hiding behind a curtain somewhere who looks at your picture and decides what you need, or if it’s automatically generated when you enter your birthdate? Either way….
2. Diets. To throw them off I’ve actually Googled things like “clothing for people who are way too thin,” and “products for really skinny people,” but for some reason they don’t believe me.
3. Plus Sized Clothing. I may not be minus-sized, Facebook, but I’m not plus either. In fact, size shouldn’t enter this equation in the first place.
4. Ads about ridding myself of belly fat. Again…you know what you can do with your ads.
5. Ads for older single men who are looking for faithful women. Who says I want older ones? Or that I’d be faithful? Let’s be fair here. Is my picture appearing on some 30-year-old man’s wall as an older woman looking for faithful men? 
6. Orthodontics. Really? Bite me, Facebook.
7. Truly unflattering photos of celebrities. Am I supposed to care that they look ugly sometimes, too? Is that supposed to make me feel better by comparison? It doesn’t. It just kind of confirms for me that you are skanky and low in your advertising practices.
8. List of suggested movies that I might like. Exactly what about liking “Pride and Prejudice” makes you recommend “Curse of Chucky?”
9. Free Trucker Schwag. I don’t know what that is, but I bet the wizard who thought I’d like this was the same one who suggested the Chucky movie.
10. Ads inviting me to join Alzheimer Trials. This one appeared right after I posted that I’d caulked my hair. Which also happened to be right before my birthday. The hair-caulking had more to do with not having a decent and honest handyman than with dementia. I was outside, and caulk was naturally on my work gloves, because how else are you supposed to smooth it down? I had climbed through some bushes to caulk some siding, and suddenly I could feel something WALKING in my hair. And the footsteps felt rather large. Not only am I known for attracting spiders, but I once had a hidden alien pod filled with baby praying mantises hatch in my sunroom after I brought the plants in for winter, and those things are the stuff of which nightmares are made. For one thing, they have necks—which no bug is supposed to have—and they have these robotic movements and little E.T. faces that they tilt just so to give you the evil eye. And then there are the big, green, spikey Popeye arms—like if Popeye fell into a vat of radioactive spinach and sprouted Edward Scissorarm blades from his anchor tattoos—that they hold out in front of them like dukes-from-hell. Praying? Ha. They are ironically holding out their giant green lobster-arms to threaten you like pointy Mohammed Alis with vicious little scythes where the boxing gloves should be. So this was what it felt like was taking giant steps on my head, so naturally it would have been a sign of dementia not to have swiped at it, even if it did leave a big plastic loogie in there that was horrible to get out. Ads for Alzheimer trials? Just because I caulked my hair? And the day before a birthday? Facebook, you are deeply evil.

I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries. ~Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Antsy

“Uh…Mom?”

It wasn’t the “Mom” part—it was the preceding “uh.” It’s something he says when he has bad news. And in this case, there was a tone to his voice that was worrisome indeed. Then he added, “Don’t freak out or anything, ‘kay?”

This ranks right up there under THINGS YOU DON’T WANT YOUR CHILD TO SAY TO YOU. Even if said child is old enough to attend college and vote and fight in armies and legally drink. In fact, maybe especially if he’s that old.

I looked up from my computer and stared at him. In retrospect, I bet I know what my face looked like, because my dad used to give me that same blank stare whenever I dropped a bombshell on him. He’d look up from his reading, his face completely impassive, and then his eyes would go: Blink. And then: Blink.

I now know that those two blinks represent a sort of slip into Matrix mode, where time slows so much that hundreds of possible kinds of bad news flit through the brain like bullets that can be plucked out of the air, Neo-style.

Then he said, “It’s my laundry.”

At first I was relieved. Laundry! And then those bullets again: My son’s laundry…! My son’s laundry. Oh. And…oh. It could be pretty bad, after all.

And it was. At least, in a sort of curious, almost scientific way. Neither of which should ever be said about laundry.

Turned out he’d bought a new pair of shorts and worn them jogging. I know you’re supposed to wash new clothes before wearing them, and I bet he knows this too. But. He does, in fact, do his own laundry, so I am not about to rock that boat by offering helpful laundering suggestions. So he had dumped the shorts along with a shirt on the floor of his old room as if the room is a big empty laundry basket.

His “new” room is the entire basement, which he’s staked claim upon little by little, squatter-style, until he’s converted it into his own apartment that he takes over when he’s home from college along with the garage and the pantry. He tries to take over the kitchen too by marking it with his flip flops the way astronauts leave their footprints on the moon—and to be left there about as long—but my daughter and I throw them down the basement steps lest we get home one day and find the whole house littered with video games and cereal bowls with blue milk in the bottom and Dorito bags and a stray sock or two.

So sitting on top of the shorts (along with a shirt) in the middle of his upstairs room was—urk—a pile of ant eggs, along with some adults running around and apparently trying to bury them down in the pockets and folds of my son’s laundry.

I hesitated telling you this because I don’t want you to think I have bugs. I really don’t get ants in this house much. Used to see a few every spring when it rained, but since the exterminator who was clearly the Walter Mitty of exterminators—the one with a personal vendetta against bugs who I think fantasized that he was more terminator than exterminator—there’s been nothing but the occasional basement spider. Even the crickets we used to get every fall have been noticeably scarce. But there was no ant trail whatsoever and no sign of ants anywhere but in that one spot perched on top of the shorts.

How did that happen? We don’t know. We’ve been Googling ants to see if it’s possible that a stray queen just flew into his shorts while he was jogging, or if she could have set up housekeeping before he bought the shorts, or what. And we still don’t know. The good thing was that they were very easy to scoop up and flush, sitting in a neat little pile like that.

Come to think of it, was it a ploy to get me to do his laundry? Because I did wash the heck out of those shorts. I don’t think so, honestly. He knows my payoff is that I will forever get to tease him about the time he had ants in the pants.

My daughter: Elizabeth will be here soon for the “service.” 

Me: Everyone should have a best friend who is willing to drop everything and come over to help you have a funeral over your toilet. Am I dressed appropriately for a fish memorial? 

Daughter (assessing my shorts): I think she would have wanted us to be comfortable.

 ~Conversation this morning after my daughter’s beta died

Improper Poll: When Bugs Attack

Last week's responses reminded me of the many bug encounters I’ve had throughout my life. One of them was when I was a teenager and a cicada flew into my hair while I was sitting around a campfire in the woods. My so-called friends did not rescue me, but instead ran away, pointing to my head with horrified faces. If hair came with an eject button, I would have detached the whole river-soaked business off my head and started over with a fresh, cicada-free batch right then and there.

But the most frightening was when I lived in Richmond Hill, Georgia, outside of Savannah, and was laying sod. I’d pick up a slab and slap it against my torso and walk it to where it needed to be. One of those times I dropped the sod, a furious mass of fire ants was left. On my chest. Like a bib you might wear for eating lobster, but picture the lobsters eating you instead, hundreds and hundreds of them, in miniature perhaps, but vicious and venomous and really really angry that you just moved their house, and with no rubber bands on their little pincer claws.

I had never encountered fire ants till I moved down South. But when I did, I was shocked that Southerners matter-of-factly train their children to avoid “fahr ant” nests and then go about their business as if it’s normal to have these subjects of a sensationalistic National Geographic special living all around you.

Fire ants masquerade as normal ants, but they have a bite that stings like fire, furious dispositions, and a talent for working with their brethren until they are one oozing mass of killer destruction. I admit that even as an adult, I couldn’t resist the temptation to poke sticks at fire ant hills just to watch them come boiling up out of the bowels of hell like a mini-volcano spewing a molten mass of teaming ant-fury. If the children were bored, sometimes we’d go on fire ant expeditions in the backyard. I know it was a horrible thing to teach my children, but those creatures never ceased to fascinate me.

Which is perhaps why I was always blundering into their nests.

During the Sod Incident, they were moving en masse up my shirt, mere inches from engulfing my face like the victim in a bad horror flick. As if in a nightmare, I remember trying to scream and nothing came out but a strangled little sound. “Urk.” Which is probably a good thing, because I didn’t need to attract attention disrobing there in my front yard. I was also flailing and running faster than I’ve ever run in my life. Once in my garage, I flung my tee-shirt as far as it would go and did a heebie-jeebie dance that lasted not only through a hot shower, but through the better part of an hour, and then returned periodically throughout the day…and ever since, as a matter of fact. I am in fact heebie-jeebieing right now.

Because although that was about ten years ago, to this day I panic a tiny bit when I see an ant, even the benign Northern kind. You never know if they’ve mutated….

Have you ever been attacked by bugs?