Big Fat Accidental Insults

Before we moved in with my Mom’s boyfriend in the city, we attended a birthday party for his daughter at their home. This was the early 90s. My Mom’s boyfriend, we can just call him Complete Jackass, was what some might call a heavy drinker. I was always impressed, if not incredibly disappointed that he woke up at all in the mornings.

Perhaps not surprisingly, both his children suffered greatly from his absentee parenting, constant drunkenness and general lack of care for others. His daughter suffered not only from the divorce of her parents but took to food for comfort and remained very heavy and unhappy for years. Her brother displayed his unhappiness by being out of the house as much as possible and when he was around he had a tendency to be an ass.

But this story took place before we (my Mom, Sister and I) really knew all those details. All we knew was that the Complete Jackass had this daughter and she was turning seven and she wanted us to come to her family party. So we went. At the end of the night, as we were leaving, the daughter was standing at the top of the tall staircase and my Mom called out, “Well thanks for having us!”

Blank stare from the top of the stairs.

My Mom tried again for a response and said, happily, “Happy Birthday, you big fat seven year old, you!” As soon as she said it, it was clear she wished she hadn’t.

“I’m not fat!” Shouted the girl.

“That is NOT what I meant,” my Mom stammered. My sister and I fought back laughter, not at the girl but at our Mom for making this mistake. My Mom often said “You big fat ____,” to describe things excitedly. She had not meant to be insulting.

Luckily my Mom recovered well and the girl was smiling when we left, that’s the good news. The bad news is we moved into that house 3 years later and stayed there for 11 long years.

Wherein I Return

So much has changed since I read my firs  blog in 2005. I had just graduated from college and had moved home to DC. I took a job as a temp between two contract positions. Walking through the quiet office suite one day I heard laughter from another office – I stopped and looked in. It was a woman close to my age and she stopped laughing when I caught her eye. She apologized, smiling and said she was reading “Amalah.” I had no idea what that meant. She sent me the link to Amalah’s blog and Thus It Began.

Amalah had a relatively small audience at that point, was pregnant with her first child and wrote about handbags and her husband and their life in DC. I checked her site often, hoping for a new post, new photos, etc. This was before twitter and Facebook exploded and before I ever had a feed for any blogs. This was when you had to actually go to a blog to check for an update. I loved it. I still do, though things have changed.

When I started blogging, I created a backlog of entries, threw up a few links to bloggers I liked and almost squealed with delight when I received my first visitor. Over time my entries grew more and more sporadic and my “audience,” (not surprisingly) dwindled from a whopping 5 visitors a day to none. I couldn’t blame anyone, if I was bored with my blog, how could anyone not be?!

So now I’m back with some idea as to what this blog will be and things are different. Join me?

On Fowl

I am not a fan of roasted chickens available in most grocery stores. Something about a hot, whole chicken encased in plastic that kind of skeeves me out. Ned, on the other hand loves them. He also loves Chinese Buffet restaurants, another thing that just grosses me out. The other night Ned decided to pick up two roasted chickens from the grocery store. When he showed them to me I looked twice, “Are those chickens?” I asked, amazed at how tiny they looked.

“Of course they are,” he said, giving me the look he gives when I question food, which is often.

“They look really small. I don’t think they’re chickens. I think you bought pigeons.”

“Pigeons? Come on, don’t be ridiculous,” he said with the same look.

I teased him for the rest of the evening about it, told him he was eating pigeon meat and displayed appropriate disdain. I remembered something right before bed and pulled it up on my iPhone before we went to sleep. He laughed at the time but not as much the next morning when he saw I had posted it to his Facebook wall.

Just try to get that song out of your head.