Ten Lessons You Want to Teach Your Kids

1. Appreciate the little things.
2. Don’t rush life.
3. Don’t pick your friends based on the color of their skin, the house they live in, the clothes they wear, or the car they drive. Pick them for the qualities that matter in the long run.
4. Respect the elderly. Show patience and listen to their stories. You will learn a lot.
5. Pick a career that based on the happiness it brings you, not for the $$ you earn.
6. Respect the beliefs and lifestyles of others. We are all different. Celebrate the differences.
7. Don’t be a follower. Stand up for what you believe in, and don’t feel pressured to follow something you do not agree with.
8. Don’t be taken advantage of in love, friendships or work.
9. Give of your heart and of your time. Charity isn’t just about the dollars.
10. Remember your roots. No matter who you become, remember where you came from.

Often I sleep with the television on, and generally it’s tuned to the news. It’s not on all night, but I fall asleep with it on and then later wake up to turn it off, and then wake again to turn it back on. During that final period, I tune it to our local news so that I wake up to the weather, the traffic and to find out what happened while I slept. Usually the big local stories are murders. Yes, murders with an S. I used to be shocked by the murders, listening to see if I recognized a name. I’m so desensitized to it all, that now I listen for the street name to see how close I am to the crime location. I hate that it’s not shocking me into fear any longer.

But what’s really buggy is that curing my last two hours of sleep each day, I’m dreaming thatI’m a participant, observer or a victim of the crimes.

I’ve got to go back to watching Nick at Night in the early hours. At least then maybe I will dream I’m Jack, Chrissy or Mr. Roper.

My Super Sweet 16 has one again demonstrated to today’s youth that your parents can be manipulated, tricked, coerced, threatened, humiliated, trained….directly in front of half the nation.

People talk about the spoiled brat kids on the show, but really, what 16 year old wouldn’t accept a brand new luxury car of their choice, along with a party in the six figure range. C’mon, it’s not the kids that we should question here, it’s the foolish parents.

Hats off to MTV for creating a show that did exactly what it intended — made fools of the adults! Applause, applause.

Dutchman Michael Heffels, known as “The Destroyer”, has won the World Air Guitar Championships in the northern Finnish city of Oulu.

Giesela Visser of New Zealand, or “Gizzy Guitar”, came second, followed by Gyuri Vergouw, known as “Pelvis Fenderbender”, of the Netherlands in third place.
Heffels won a real electric guitar and an amplifier designed and donated by guitarist Brian May, of the legendary rock group Queen.

Competitors play on an invisible instrument that can be electric or acoustic or both.

Some things just beg to be repeated. This is one of those things:

Reprinted from Sept. 2002 — Pitt junior Brandon Smith wanted a tattoo that proclaimed his manliness, so he decided to get the Chinese characters for “strength” and “honor” on his chest. After 20 minutes under the needle of localtattoo artist Andy Sakai, he emerged with the symbol for “small penis” embedded in his flesh.

“I had it for months before I knew what it really meant,” Smith said.

“Then I went jogging through the Carnegie Mellon campus and a group of Asian kids started laughing and calling me ‘Shorty.’ That’s when I knew something was up.”

Sakai, an award-winning tattoo artist, was tired of seeing sacred Japanese words, symbols of his heritage, inked on random white people. So he used their blissful ignorance to make an everlasting statement. Any time acustomer came to Sakai’s home studio wanting Japanese tattooed on them, he modified it into a profane word or phrase.

“All these preppy sorority girls and suburban rich boys think they’re so cool ’cause they have a tattoo with Japanese characters. But it doesn’t mean shit to them!” Sakai said. “The dumbasses don’t even realize that I’ve written ‘slut’ or ‘pervert’ on their skin!”

In the last month, seven people unknowingly received explicit tattoos from the disgruntled artist. Kerri Baker, a Carlow College freshman, paid $50 to have the symbols for “beautiful goddess” etched above her belly button, but when she went into Szechuan Express Asian Noodle Shop sporting a bare midriff, the giggling employees explained to her that the tattoo really said, “Insert General Tso’s Chicken Here!”

“I don’t even like General Tso’s!” Baker sobbed. “I’m a vegetarian!”

Sakai doesn’t feel guilty about using hapless college students as canvases for his graffiti.
“I think I’m helping my fellow man by labeling all the stupid people in the world,” he explained. “It’s not a crime, it’s a public service.”

I have a busy weekend:

Friday – Wedding Rehearsal – 5:00
Friday – Wedding Rehearsal Dinner – immediately following rehearsal and probably a drunk fest
Saturday – Wedding – 1:00 – I’m the videographer and Misty is the photographer – This one is a definite drunk fest

Saturday – VIP Tickets to the Hospitality Tent at ESCS – East Coast Surfing Championships – 5:00 to 10:00 – I’ll probably give the tickets to Cristin since her friend Heidi is in first right now. They can drink for free in the tent, and meet cute surfer boys. Gosh, to be 21 again!
Sunday – See the baby boy, who I’m missing already. He’s staying with the Grandparents.

This is a girls’ weekend basically. Misty and I are leaving the husbands to fend for themselves. Holla!

Have you ever been so pissed off, that you feel the heat in your face, your eyes start to water, your temples start thumping, and you feel like smacking the cause of it all across the face.

My husband, is an ass. Sure, I know his back hurts, but….he cooked a ham steak, scalloped potatoes, scrambled eggs, mashed potatoes, and ate out of at least four other dishes. My point, you ask? He left three dirty pots, three tops to the pots, several dishes and bowls, several glasses and a plethora of utensils in the sink…DIRTY DISHES IN THE SINK MAKE ME NUTSO ! ! ! And when I walk in after working all day, he says, “just leave it. I’ll do it in a little bit.” Well, I can’t just leave it. It drives me nutso, whacko, turns me into a crazed lunatic. And so I clean it, and as I do, I get even more pissed off, because if he is capable of making such an enormous mess, then he’s fucking capable of cleaning it up. I finish. I want to watch the news…ALONE. He follows me into the room, and makes a smart ass comment about Cindy Sheehan, and how she had nothing to bitch about. Anyone that knows me, knows how totally against this war I am, and have been from the day the possibility of it was mentioned. The comment causes me to erupt, and now after my political spew off to him, I am furious, furious, furious.

I wish Soapbox would hurry and call so we can do our Target run. I need to get out of this house before I kill him.

I feel better now.

My son has deemed himself a gender expert, a fashion expert, and a healer.

At Wawa today, in a very loud voice, he questioned the gender of the clerk. “Is that a man?” “No”, I whispered to him with my back to the clerk. “Yes, that is a man”, he responded way too loudly. I tried to shake my head no, as unobviously as possible. He wasn’t taking that answer lightly, and kept insisting that the clerk was a man on the way out. Loudly insisting. The sad thing was that this woman was not masculine. She was an African-American woman, with a short, sylishly cut gray hair. She wore glasses and the standard Wawa t-shirt. She looked like a woman.

As we arrive home, my neighbor is returning home after a swim in the pool. She’s carrying her beach bag, wearing her little sun hat, and the blue swimsuit that Ethan has seen her in multiple times, and has previously questioned her about. However, he inists on reminding her that she’s wearing what everyone calls “the fat girl suit”, and he tells her in his smurfish voice, “Cathie, that is not a swimming bathing suit, that is a ballerina dress. You cannot wear that in the water. That is for ballerinas. Why are you wearing that dress in the water? You cannot do that. That is wrong, Cathie.”

Ugh, he’s such a joy in public.

Adam is still out of commission. The back thing continues to wear on, and Ethan knows that Adam is limited because of it. The other day I told him that Daddy couldn’t take him to the movies because he can’t sit in the theater. Earlier this evening he comes into the kitchen and tells me that Daddy can take him to the movies now. I asked why, and he explained that he rubbed Daddy’s tummy, and that now his back and legs don’t hurt anymore. Sad and sweet. Even sadder that the movie he’s trying to get Adam to take him to is Shrek 3. Has it even been made yet?

And then there are the wonderful things he says. He came home from school D-I-R-T-Y today. I mean filthy dirty! When I asked him how he got so dirty he explained, “We played outside today. I got very dirty. But that’s OK. When you get really dirty, it means you had lots of fun. I had fun today Mommy.”

I smiled. Once again, he made me smile. Gotta love him.

Overheard tonight:

Ethan: Daddy, I don’t want you to die.

Ethan: Because I don’t want a new Daddy with blonde hair.

Sure, everyone has the typical reasons – love, continuing the family name, the legacy thing, the urge to raise someone and hopefully help someone be a productive member of society.

But really, there are so many more important, more meaningful reasons. For one, the photo opportunities.

What’s better than forcing your kids to hold Pigs’Feet at the Super K, and snapping pictures of them as you tell them to smile and say, “We love our pigs’ feet”. Parenting is so much fun, and incredibly rewarding.

Thanks to Misty for snapping this one.