My resolve doesn’t celebrate The New Year.

At December 28, 2009
By Lotus, aka Sarcastic Mom
In Miscellaneous Blabbering, Writing, {W}rite-Of-Passage Challenge
14

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I don’t. I never have. I have always seen making them as this thing that other people do, like buying lottery tickets or having sex on airplanes. I don’t do it. I think it must be great fun considering all the hype, but I’ve never felt the particular need to do so myself. Besides, I can think of good reasons not to buy a lottery ticket (I also don’t burn money or throw it in the trash), and who wants to try that hard for an orgasm with the airplane sink faucet up their ass? Those bathrooms are seriously cramped. Count me out.

When I was 24 I had the realization that I had tried my first cigarette at 12, and technically, I’d been smoking for half my life. Whoa.

For half of my life, I’d been working on an addiction that held no positives for me or anyone around me, and something about that made me realize what a hold those damn things had on me. It was the disgusting and shocking realization I needed to be completely ready to give up the dangerous habit for good. I was successful. I have never looked back, and my only regret is that I ever picked up that first cigarette.

I had attempted quitting two previous times. I can’t remember specifically why I embarked on the effort the times that I failed. When I try, I draw up vague ghosts of reasons like, “smoking is bad, m’kay” “smokers smell even worse than patchoulied up hippies, man,” and “that shit is expensive, yo!”

None of those reasons was the right one for me. Yes, of course, not killing myself and polluting the environment SHOULD have been good enough reasons, I know. Chalk that up to Me = Assholeface. For whatever reason, I didn’t have true resolve. I wasn’t ready then. When I was, however, I was passionate and serious. Something inside of me would not let me fail.

I think this encapsulates the reasons why I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. It feels like a faddy waste of time – if I’m ready to make an important change in my life before the New Year, I see no reason to wait. If I’m not ready at the New Year, I see no reason to force a change that is so much more likely to end in failure.

Will you be ready to stop smoking/lose weight/quit being a nagging bitch of a wife in 2010?

If so, will you be ready because it’s the right time, the reason is pressing, and you feel passionate about it? Or will it just be because the page on you calendar flipped over and you feel trapped by tradition? If you fail, will you get back on the horse, so to speak, and kick that thing’s ass? Or will you give up because “it’s just a NY resolution” ?

All of that being said, I feel the need to make the point (lest you hurl rotten tomatoes and used tampons at me) that I DO think it’s AWESOME to make healthy and positive changes in your life, no matter what time of year it is. If The New Year is your time, go for it. If you like to make a New Year’s Resolution, I do hope you’re successful. And if you’re not, there’s always 2011, right? *wink*

As for me? I resolve to stay up too late and drink too much on New Year’s Eve. That’s about as far as I can go. Baby steps. I think I’ll wait until at least when pigs fly out of my anus 2020 to even think about hitting that ‘nagging bitch of a wife’ one. I can’t imagine being anywhere near ready for that ever anytime soon.

Today’s post is my answer to The Resolution, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.

The following people took the challenge, too.

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Lazy Douche Enablers: Shawn of Backpacking Dad

At September 1, 2009
By Lotus, aka Sarcastic Mom
In Guest Post, Humor, Lazy Douche Enablers, Parenting, Poop/Farts
20

Lazy Douche Enablers write guest posts for me every other Tuesday. That way, I can be a much better… you guessed it: Lazy Douche. I’ve been such a LD lately, that I hadn’t been posting the LD posts people wrote for me awhile back. One might say I don’t NEED the help. Regardless… Today’s Enabler is Shawn, of Backpacking Dad.

Hot Babysitter

My daughter is almost two years old. During her life we’ve left her with a babysitter exactly zero times, until last week.

A professional babysitter, I mean. We’ve had family or friends watch her while we stole an evening or even a weekend away on our own. But we could never get our act together enough to actually find some high school or college kid to come over after the kid was sleeping to eat all of our food while inviting his or her friends over to engage in hijinks.

At first it was because she was our baby! How can we leave our baby with a stranger? Later it was because, enh, we’d kind of gotten used to only sporadic alone time. And even later it was because how could anyone be competent at this? We’d been training for two years to take care of a kid our daughter’s age; how was some kid who couldn’t even vote or drink going to be qualified to do this job?

It never occurred to me that what I ought to have been worried about was having a hot babysitter. But this is a theme in the suburbs.

Before I do any more typing here I should say that the person about whom I am writing is definitely over 18, and I have every confidence she is also over 21. Not to diminish the general creepy old man factor involved in this post at all, but I hope to at least keep it from landing me in jail. She’s old enough to smoke, and she’s in college. Don’t call the cops.

Anyway….

We had hired her once to help grandma watch the kid at a friend’s house while the friends were also going away for an evening, leaving their daughter in grandma’s care as well. It was a good opportunity to vet a sitter in a controlled environment. But I never met her. My wife took care of the arrangements. Our friends, however, made a point of telling me that she was hot. Because they’re shit-disturbers.

Needing a sitter for an afternoon when our daughter was too sick for daycare we invited her over for a few hours. I was already out of the house when she arrived, but I would be the first one home, so my first meeting with our hot babysitter would be solo.

Well hell.

I walked in the door and my daughter came running over to me, smiling from ear to ear. They’d been watching Nemo and Cars and jumping around the apartment loudly enough that the downstairs neighbour dragged herself out of her sick bed to ask them to keep it down. A grand old time was had by all.

And the babysitter? Yes, hot. Totally smoke-burned voice, though, that I recognized too well from my days of hanging out with the cool kids smoking behind the school.

And the house reeked. It reeked. But not of cigarette smoke.

Not of any kind of smoke. That would have gotten her fired, but I’d at least have understood. Kids are boring sometimes and you just want to help them become interesting by frying your brain a little.

No, the house reeked of a desperate assault on the bathroom. It reeked of gut-rotted, whiskey shits.

Hello babysitter. My my, you are pretty cute. But what the fuck did you do to my bathroom?

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, “Hey, man. You have a kid. A toddler. She probably just shat herself as she is wont to do, and the sitter just didn’t change the diaper.” But as any parent will tell you, we know what our kid’s shit smells like. We can pick it out in a crowd of toddlers.

It was really hard to reconcile how she looked with how she had clearly violated my plumbing. It was enough to make me suspect that she’d had her boyfriend over and he’d done the number on the pipes.

Guess what. No matter how hot your babysitter is, if you are convinced she has crapped a raccoon you will never be able to have inappropriate thoughts about her.

Damn. Because I’m pretty sure one of the perks of being a dad is the idle, harmless thoughts you’re allowed to have about the babysitter.

No? What are you, an America-hater? Do you want the terrorists to win?

We had a brief introductory conversation about school and the like, but it seemed like she really wanted to get the hell out of there. Wouldn’t you? If you had dropped a deuce in your employer’s can and he’d come home to some ungodly stew of a stench? Yeah, I’d want to leave too. Quickly. And so she did.

Goodbye, hot babysitter. I’m not sure I can hire you again, not because you’re hot, but because oh my god.

After she left I chased my still sniffling daughter around the living room for a while. And I noticed that the smell never dissipated. In fact, it grew stronger.

And sure enough, when I checked the contents of my daughter’s diaper I discovered that I had completely maligned my hot babysitter. Er, her hot babysitter.

Because my daughter was home sick. And part of her sickness was apparently holy Christ on a bicycle what is dying in your intestines? It completely changed the, well, the everything about her elimination, making it totally unrecognizable.

Is this post really about shit? Sick shit at that?

Nope.

This post is about how I have a totally hot babysitter.

Phew.

Although, now I might have to fire her for not changing that fucking diaper before I got home. Jesus. See? Never hire a smoker to babysit; they can’t smell a damned thing.

But, she is hot. How much hotness does it take to make up for anosmia?

______________________________________________________

Shawn is a dad with a backpack that his kids ride in, yes. Fortunately, his posts are filled with stories and reflections that go far beyond the simplicity of his own self-description. If you haven’t been entertained by him regularly yet, you should make your way over to Backpacking Dad and hang out. He’s often quite brilliant.