Middle Aged Sexcapades

I can't believe I'm actually middle aged. 38 to be exact, and I suppose that's middle aged. Or maybe not, what with how long people are living these days. Maybe middle age is really around 50. Wait, let me check Wikipedia. Eh, shit. The Census defines it as 35, Collins Dictionary as 40 and Oxford English Dictionary as 45. Erik Erikson says 40. So the average of that: 40. Okay, I'm not there yet. Close, but no cigar.

Things with Guy #1 are going really well. We survived Thanksgiving, to which his ex-wife did not show up, and I think next year maybe I just want to stay at home and eat country ham and broccoli casserole. I won't have my kids next Thanksgiving, so it won't matter if I do that. We'll see.

I took my children to see Santa this past weekend, and my mother went with us, since that's my normal routine. I had planned on The Ex NOT being there, since he bitched about Santa every year since my older daughter was born, but my older daughter insisted on calling him on the way to see Santa and then insisting to him that he come. To his credit, he did manage to extricate himself from World of Warcraft and get his ass in to see Santa, and didn't bitch about it much. Maybe his third marriage is agreeing with him.

My mother got to my house a little early and we were sitting pretty much hip-to-hip on the sofa, trying to figure out her fancy schmancy new iPhone, being that she upgraded from a tracfone to an iPhone with nothing in between (who the fuck does that?) when my phone buzzed. As a prequel to this whole story, Guy #1 and I had been indecently texting each other all day, well, because we can. It's my phone and if I want to text dirty, I can do just that.

Anyway, my phone rang.

I see it's Guy #1 calling.

I answered, "Hello?" even though I knew it was him, because my mother and children were in the room.

Keep in mind my mother and I were still sitting hip-to-hip at this point, thus causing the proximity of her head to my head to be about six to eight inches apart being that we were looking at her phone together.

Guy #1 says, with no greeting, "I wish you were bouncing up and down on my cock right now."

I was silent.

I did not move a muscle in my body as I cut my eyes over to my mother and wondered if she had heard that, since her ear was only a few inches away from my phone that I then desperately tried to press into my inner  ear.

That five seconds of silence between the three of us, Guy #1, my mother and I was deafening.

And then my mother snorted, and I think just a teensy bit of soup that she had been eating right when Guy #1 made his proclamation shot out of her nose. She got up and stumbled into the kitchen and I heard a chair scrape back from the table.

Oh. My. God. She heard that.

I whispered to Guy #1, "My mother is HERE!"

He says, "So?"

I said, "She heard THAT!"

Of course Guy #1 didn't believe me, and the peals of laughter coming from my kitchen didn't convince him. I was somewhere between laughing and crying at this point, because that's pretty embarrassing. Mothers are not supposed to know that stuff. Although, I'm pretty sure she's come to the conclusion that after a year of dating, he and I have consummated the relationship. But still, that's not a point of discussion between my mother and I because I am 38 and don't need sex advice from her. That's what I have girlfriends for.

Guy #1 continued to insist that my mother did not hear him say that. I finally had to hold the phone out and yell at my mother in the kitchen, "Hey, did you hear that?" To which more laughter came. I put the phone back up to my ear and said, "SEE?!?!? She heard you!"

And then it got worse. My mother yelled back, "It brings back memories!"

Oh. My. God.

Who knew that in one split second one of my eardrums could burst and I could throw up in my mouth, all at the same time? It's amazing what the human body can do, that's for sure.

With that, Guy #1 was silent. He said, "Did she really hear me?"

I whispered, "Yeah, she heard you."

Guy #1 said, "Oh my god, why would you have your phone on speaker?"

I said, "It wasn't on SPEAKER, you damn fool. We were sitting right next to each other."

Guy #1 argued back, "I wasn't that loud!"

I said, "You know I've got bad ears and I have to keep the volume all the way up!"

He said, "What's wrong with your ears?"

Holy shit. And that's when it struck me. Bad ears, bad eyes, bad back. I'm getting old. Helloooooo, middle age. I didn't think the realization would hit me like this.

Some days are just like that, I suppose.

The Write Stuff???? (Part Deux)

Still working on this recommendation in my head. I got halfway through it in my brain last night, but then the whole thing spiraled out of control into a Breakfast-Club-this-is-where-we-are-twenty-years-later schtick. Collectively, my classmates and I are a lot of things. I'm not going to name them all out, because that would just be too cliche, but we are good stuff, and here and there are bits of badness. Kind of like someone in the class behind me who got picked up for a messy felony offense and then deported to a country that they hadn't lived in since they were an infant because their dumbass adoptive Farmville parents never finalized the naturalization process. Boom! Hello, impoverished South American country where someone doesn't speak the language and has no relatives! But then on the other hand, there is my senior year prom date who very likely could end up as governor one day and I'll be his dirty little secret from high school. The total dichotomy of his father (who was the school superintendent) kind of leading the charge on almost expelling me from school and then, reversing course by allowing his son to take me to prom always made me wonder if dear old dad was just trying to make sure his son had a sure thing on prom night. Cause he didn't! That joke was on him! Anyway, this is exactly why I posted our prom picture on facebook. I.am.ahead.of.the.curve.here.

But back to homeslice and I. We ended up going to the same college, but he was lucky enough to live on campus and I was not-so-lucky enough to live with my father because he and my mother had basically determined they weren't going to pay for me to live on campus. My choices were Longwood or VCU. I was jealous of homeslice, because he got experience college as it's meant to be experienced, and that's with the view from a dorm window. I got to experience college with a view out of my commuter windshield. We ran into each once or twice that first semester, and I drove him to the bank once, but then headed right back to Farmville when living with my mother became an better option than living with my father. The lesser of two evils, I suppose.

The last time I saw homeslice was 1996-ish, when somehow a bunch of us from high school ended up in the trailer he and some other guys from high school had rented drinking beer and laughing about high school. I got the distinct impression that they were all looking at my T&A and found a reason to leave. Yes, the post-high school years were good for me, developmentally.

I suppose what amazes me about homeslice's writing (and I've tried to go back and read his whole blog, but it's damn near impossible because there's got to be at least a thousand entries on that thing, plus I still haven't read his stuff that's been published. My name is bad friend.) is that he manages to catch the sheer hopelessness, poverty, small-mindedness small-townish-ness and aimlessness that is where we grew up but he does with the acuity of being able to look from the outside in, and back out again. Mix that with varying degrees of socio-economic awareness (by the time I was in eighth grade I could break down all the different types of white people there were in our county, I'm ashamed to admit), a convoluted racial hyper-vigilance cultivated by our county's history, and hanging out in a junkyard every now and then. Some of the shit he writes about I don't get, that usually being music and MMA, but the rest of it, yeah, I'm there. Of course, I'm kind of biased, being that we've known each other for years upon years upon years, and I know of the people and places he writes about.

I'm definitely going to do the recommendation, but here's the rub. He didn't give me enough time to frantically read up on and research about ten other authors in my mind I'd like to compare him to in my head prior to writing this damn thing, and I can't count on Wikipedia to be reliable for this. Yes, it's reliable for me diagnosing all of my medical problems, but for something this serious - hell to the naw! This program only accepts ten students per year. I did at least get on the school website and do some reading on that. The other, and greater, concern that I have is that I'm going to be the person to dumb this whole process down. Obviously, homeslice is smarter than me. His slice of genius is slightly bigger than my slice of brilliance, which means he's way ahead of me. Seriously, though, I have some serious reservations about me being the retard who accidentally stumbled into the Mensa meeting or something. Something this big, I can't fuck this up. I mean, this is someone's life here, and what if these people look at my letter and they're like, 'That's the dumbest and most ignorant shit we've ever read. Admission denied.' What if I have too many commas? We,all,know,I, have a, thing,for,commas,,,,,. And I don't want to just pull something out of my ass. I'm honored to have even been asked, considering I consider homeslice to be not only smarter than me, but a better writer, too. You don't respect and honor something by just pulling some shit out of your ass. Even though I've had something floating around my head for the past couple of days, I can't let this shit percolate but too long, because the deadline is looming and shit that's over-percolated always taste like, well, shit.

The Write Stuff??? (Part 1)

So I've been asked to write a recommendation for a friend of mine. Not a big deal, right, because I've written a few completely trumped up job references before, making the said candidate sound like they really should be working for the Supreme Court or something. But this isn't for a job. This is for a friend's MFA Creative Writing program admission. Huh, you say? Yeah, me too.

But not just any friend, well, because, I don't have that many friends. Ha! Just kidding! I'm super popular. Or not. Anyway, I've known this cat since fourth grade, and even in fourth grade, he wasn't a guy, or a boy, he was a cat. He was that kid who had hair that was too long, had a really cool name and his parents were rumored to be hippies. Yeah, I had a terrible crush on him. He ignored me completely and I think he told me I was stupid at some point on the bus ride home one afternoon. But that was fourth grade, and then a new boy transferred in to school starting in fifth grade and I had a new crush. Who also ignored me and told me I was stupid. My sixth grade crush turned into an actual boyfriend, you know, who actually asked me to 'go with him'. Seventh grade crush was the guy who I snitched out for giving me pot in tenth grade, eighth grade crush also thought I was stupid, ninth grade crush dumped me for one of my arch enemies, and so it goes on.

I got completely off track there. People keep texting me and I can't concentrate. See, I told you I was popular! Anyway, my fourth grade crush and I never had any classes together until high school. My school was small, and there were probably only about enough students for four or five separate classes (if I recall correctly) per grade, and I was always in the second smartest class. Those 80's standardized tests pretty much kept the same kids in the same class with each other all the way through middle school. I always realized that I was never in the smartest class, and watched other kids filter in and out of the second smartest class, but I never seemed to be able to work my way into the smartest class category. I blame this partially on my mother for not giving a fuck about my education other than to harass me endlessly about why I wasn't doing better (even though I think I recall her never making much of an effort to help me) and I blame this partially on myself for being pretty much satisfied with second smartest class. And maybe a little blame goes on a couple of teachers here and there for just sucking in general.

By the time I got to high school, I had determined that the only way that I was going to succeed in the high school social game was going to be by making smartest class. I buckled down in ninth grade and actually started applying myself and applied for the 'honors' type program, which really wasn't honors but probably more like what the good high schools were teaching, and voila! Social entree was mine! All of a sudden I was in the smartest class, minus math. I compensated for that by being in the retard math classes. And a whole new world of kids opened up to me, those kids who had always been in the smartest class and had been together since fourth grade (or before). I had a lot of catching up to do. Suddenly, I was in class with my fourth grade crush. Awkward high school friendships were formed, because these kids knew I didn't have the history with them that they had with each other. I stayed in smartest English and History classes for the rest of high school, and supplemented it with French (where I insisted on only speaking English, because really, I was just taking that shit for college, not to be able to actually speak it), and did a few other things, along with remaining in dumbest math class that was almost learning disabled (still with the guy who gave me the pot - there's a reason for this, I think) and working my way down from smartest biology to pretty damn stupid chemistry.

The friendship that fourth grade homeslice and I had was strange, because I thought he was a little weird in that hippie-commune kind of way, and he probably thought I was as self-absorbed and shallow as any teenage girl. Our friendship was also made even more awkward by the fact that my stepfather had, on occasion or two, arrested his father. And I think his uncle. And was gunning for him to make it a hat-trick. Homeslice knew this, I knew this, my stepfather knew this and his father knew this. So he and I would kid around in school and then go home and have to individually hear shit about how the other's person's dad or stepdad was a shithead, blah blah blah. For a lack of a better word, the friendship was precariously based upon whether or not my stepfather was going to be involved in arresting one of his relatives. That always seems to complicate shit, you know? I was desperate to be included in all of the cool parties that I always heard about AFTER THE FACT, and I've convinced myself that homeslice and our other classmates were probably torn between inviting me and living in fear of getting themselves locked up. I don't care what anyone says, growing up with a (step)parent who is the long arm of the law in a small town, and eager to be a complete dick, really, really, really sucks. Period. I think most of the trouble that I got into in high school was directly related to my desire to prove that I wasn't a goody two-shoes.

And that's it for tonight. More tomorrow, as I try to piece this recommendation together in my brain.