The Modern Prince

Apparently my Mother-in-law reads these posts.

Hi Mother-In-Law-Of-Bjorniavelli!

Lest you think that somehow this is a persona that I put on for your benefit, I present to you a letter to Wife of Bjorniavelli with regard to Son of Bjorniavelli:

“So, you have an odd child.

We got up at 8:30, I fed her fruit and, by popular demand, leftover ziti for breakfast. Then I put her in the playpen so I could do the dishes. She was alternating between saying ‘Daaaaaaddy… Daaaaaaddy….’ all sweetly and shrieking like a gorilla and pulling up the bottom of her playpen like she was throwing a jungle tantrum.

Then I started making the grasshopper pie. Other adventures aside, the girl was kind of fussy in the cage for so long, but then I went over to her and gave her a fingerfull of the creamcheese/whipped cream/mint frosting. She got all bug-eyed and freaky like I put something really hot in her mouth, she actually spit it out and then started pawing at her tongue with her hands until she got it all out. So I rinsed her hands and face off because she was freaking. But then she was OK. So I started licking the spatula and going ‘Mmmmm…’ so she’d go ‘Mmmmm…’ and inch closer to me. ‘Mmmmm…’ ‘Mmmmm…’ inch closer to me. ‘Mmmmm….’ ‘Mmmmm…’ inch closer to me. She finally got to the point where she actually had the spatula inside the confines of her mouth, but didn’t actually closer her mouth to get any of it inside. Then she’d back up 3 feet and look at me and go ‘nom, nom, nom’ in all seriousness. Rinse and repeat about 4 times and I was chasing her around the house with the spatula yelling ‘Try it! You’ll like it! It’s sugary and yummy!’ and she was toddling away from me looking over her shoulder and going ‘Mmm…. Nom, Nom, Nom…’ and then running away again.

Also, apparently, my mad skills as a chef extraordinaire do not apply to the realm of the patissier. You know that episode in I Love Lucy where she turns a blender or mixer or chocolate something on, and everything goes flying all over the walls (and by ‘that episode’, I mean ‘every episode’)? That’s what it was like. Apparently, you can’t just go right after the cream cheese with the mixer. You have to be sneaky. I underestimated the sneakiness. So, I think I cleaned all of the creamed cheese (served light and fluffy!) off of the walls. But… you may want to cut up your pineapple sooner rather than later to avoid infection by rotting cream cheese.

I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. I can’t decide if I should or if I should wait until lunch time. I want soup, but we’re having soup for dinner. I’d have pizza, but pizza’s our back splash for in case I screw up soup for dinner. Who am I kidding.. I can have pizza all day.

Love you!

Also, I’m going to post this on my blog. Because I think it’s funny.

– Bjorniavelli”

That is, save a few changed letters to protect the innocent, a cut/paste of the e-mail to my wife this morning.  I am particularly proud of ‘Patissier’, but I would be even more so if I could come up with a way to write it correctly without having to use stinky French accent marks.

I may or may not have mentioned that my wife has sucked me into the dark, dismal, black hole of death and doom that is Facebook.  I also play Mafia Wars.  I’m coming to realize just how insidious this whole ‘Social Networking’ thing is when I actually caught myself considering starting a Twitter account.  Because, of course, so many people read this blog that it’s important to *also* have a twitter, the better to bombard my readers with witticism (jolly good, witticism.  Quite).  And, of course, what I need right now when taking care of the kid full-time is causing my attention span to resemble a retarded goldfish instead of the super goldfish I used to be (now instead of ‘water, water, water, water, oooh look!  A castle! water, water, water, water, ooh look!  A castle! water, water, …’ it’s more like ‘ooh look wa-, ooh look wa-, ooh look wat-, help I’m drowning! ooh look wa-’) is to engage in a site that’s specifically intended to be as short as socially possible.

Regardless, I find myself coming up with observations that I’m absolutely positive *every*body needs to know.  But rather than flood their facebook pages with me, I thought I’d post them here.  In no particular order, they were:

• http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=8776841, Because of course ‘They were asking for it’ has worked in so many *other* stalking cases.
• The floor in my garage is much cleaner in the places where the dogs lick for hours at a time than in the corners they never  go in.
• I hate hair.
• My neighbor has been using a table saw for, like, 8 hours straight.  I can’t figure out what kind of woodworking that involves.
• My feet were very dirty after walking in the garage.
• There’s a dead bug that one of the dogs brought in sitting in front of the back door.  It’ll be there for several days, I imagine.
• I do not enjoy cleaning up baby poo from various and sundry furniture first thing in the morning.
• She-ra and Brutal Legends seem to have the exact same motif, which I feel was probably not intended.
• I think that was it.

You’ll notice that out of, like, 8 thoughts (the last was sort of a meta-thought… but it would likely have gone on Twitter), only one of them was even slightly amusing.  It’s like, Twitter somehow takes everything that was good and holy about blogging (ok, so, let’s call it ‘everything that wasn’t morally bankrupt and socially inane’… that’s probably closer to the height of blogging) and driveled it down into… tweenager.

Three Stinks for the Puppy-doos under the stair,
Seven for the Grandparents in their Corinth home,
Nine for Dadadadadadada doomed to smelly fare,
One for the Britches McPhee on her dark, dark throne
With the scent of sour hot dogs, where the Shadows lair.
One Poo to rule them all, One Pooto find them,
One Poo to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
From the dark nether regions of one fair girl,
The Doom Poo, now where the heck’s Frodo when you freaking need him?

In other literary terms: the curse “May the poos of a thousand rotten diapers infest your nostrils” has come true.

That scene in judges where Ehud stabs King Egion and the sword disappears, and the guts come pouring out.  It was sort of like that.  But no sword, no fat king, no morbid images, just poo.  Lots and lots of stinky poo.

I have a call pending with that company that cleans up houses after people die in them because it’s just too traumatic and biohazardous for the families to do it themselves.

Long, long ago I read that goldfish have a memory span of 9 seconds. Aside from the awesome joke of “water, water, water, ooh! A castle! Water, water, water, ooh! A castle! Water, water, water…” it has recently had me considering my wife’s dog. The stupid one. To be polite, she makes those guys that shoot guns up in the air near their house to celebrate minor things look smart. This is the same dog that put a dent in my tailgate because she jumped into it before I put it down for her to get in the bed of my truck. Dumb, dumb, dumb. In any case, we had hope for her that somehow she’d violated the laws of thermodynamics (which is against the rules of the house) and taught her rawhide bones to reproduce. Now I think that her memory lasts for 5 days or so. And when we got back from being out of town she got really excited that for the last couple of years some crazy person has been burying bones all over our house and yard. Needless to say, there is a pile of a half-dozen in our bedroom now and another that’s at least knee high in the middle of the backyard. I am impressed by her ability to bury them in my concrete floored garage , though.

Unrelatedly, I’ve decided that my wife’s grandfather would be Hank Hill. If, that is, King of the Hill had been set in the 1930’s. I’ve slowly come to this conclusion after contemplating his explanation that he didn’t build his garage himself, he got himself a little cores boy to help. I do t think that I impressed him when I asked “Which color?”

I’ve also decided to point out a ‘no duh’ moment. The gummint’s got their fancy cash for clunkers program. Apparently, it’s been massively popular. In other news, people who give away money make lots of friends. That is all.

My wife was teaching her class.  You have to understand how little I enjoyed my freshman level college courses.  I enjoyed them so little that I just didn’t go.  I really appreciated Professor Sahibzada.  Largely because of his name.  But also because of his penchant for wandering around campus on his Japanese-style bicycle and talking in a Michael Jackson voice (his actual voice… he was Persian or something).  Incidentally, I also appreciate the name of one of the bad guys in my new video game: King Shishkababoo.

So, as I sit in my chair all of 36 inches from my wife talking into a microphone, I realized that not only did I not like these classes the first time through, but this, the several dozenth time through, is like listening to Raze.  I hate Raze.  They’re terrible.  And I actually listened to the whole song after I searched for it instead of my wife.  Don’t get me wrong, my wife frequently has deep and insightful things to say.  But from 7-10 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she may as well be Obama’s rhetoritician.

This results in frequent needs for me to do things loudly nearby.  Whether it’s screaming at the giggling baby in the bathtub, standing outside and seeing if her students can hear me from my new trees in the front yard, or singing wierd songs as quiet as I can until she turns to point out that they can still hear me.  It was this last scenario that resulted in her comment ‘You know that when you sing in Falsetto, I can’t understand a word you say’.  She obviously doesn’t understand the allure of the Falsetto.  Regardless, the proper response to that was ‘I can’t really understand what they’re saying in the song, either’.

It was at this point that I realized that the title of the song was ‘Moth’.  Therefore, the chorus line was probably ‘I won’t fly around your fire anymore’.  Not ‘I won’t light a fire while you’re farting anymore’.

Imagine that. Beowulf the movie is already only five bucks.

I’m just finishing up my midterm/final that I convinced my students to take on the same day. One of my students apparently decided that the best plan was to let his kids run loose on the downstairs lobby. We can hear them. All through the test. Every 5 mins the student raises his head and says ‘that’s my kid!’

Realize that we’re three floors, several hallways, and at least 300 feet away. I’m just not sure what to think about that.

Oh yah. And I can update from my iPhone now. Lots of time to kill.

“I will be 24 this year. I have two children, a three-year-old and a one-year-old. I will be getting married within the next two years, we are not rushing into anything.”

So says one of my more literate students.  If you’re not aware, I teach college classes online.  I have to give that piece of backstory, since I try really hard not to spend all my time whinin, err mockin, err discussing my  students and their…

You know how short people are vertically challenged?  And handicapped people are, I dunno, perambulatorily challenged?  And blind people are vision challenged?  And the people across the street from me are don’t-be-a-jerk challenged?  Ok, so my students are frequently challenged, too.  Not all of them, I guess I need to make that clear.  But just like with anything else in life, I tend to focus on the ones that are since the ones that I like don’t cause me to go drinking large quantities of Vodka (Candrick!  Will you never leave me!  You’re like one of the ghosts of patients that always end up in at least one episode of critically-acclaimed hospital dramas!).  Besides, the less-than-perfect (*cough*cough*) students are more amusing, and that’s really what this whole blog thing is about, right?  Anywho, on to the main stream of conciousness:

… forward-thinking challenged state.  I figure it’s not a good idea to dis the place that puts food on your table (or, at this point, food on the table of the banker who authorized my student loans, I guess).  But I’ll make an exception at this point since, really, “not rushing into anything”?  I’ve got a 6-month old at home.  My wife and I are thinking about having kids.  This July will be the three-year anniversary of living in our house.   Someday, I’d like to own a house.  ”I swear officer, 120 is nothing compared to what I was doing before you clocked me!”

I mean, really.  This is like the student that I had in my first on-ground class in Dallas (ok, that school really did have incompetent students, but I only taught there for one semester before I decided I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.  I can bash them, because I don’t work for them anymore.  Plus, they probably smell funny.  And they’re ugly.  And they drool.  Get the picture, yet?).  About 2 months before I was scheduled to be married, she calmly explained to me that people shouldn’t get married.  It was dangerous.  What if you end up not liking the person?  She then proceeded to explain to me how she had 5 children, ages 5 through 21 (Twenty One!) all with the same guy, and they’d been living together for 25 years, but she still wasn’t certain she wanted to marry him.  Marriage is a big step, she needed to be absolutely sure about this guy first.  She also then explained how they were almost finished paying off their mortgage.

So, anyways, I need to come up with a witty and yet not-going-to-get-me-fired reply to this student.  Something along the lines of ‘What a coincidence, I have four children, two cars, a goat, and three fiances… I feel very confident in my decision not to rush into anything.  Except the goat, he’s going to the taco-stand next week.’

Now, I try not to spend much time discussing my various vices.  I may or may not have mentioned that I have been introduced to them all by my wife, so I consider them to be family affairs.  But I recognize that not everyone might agree, seeing as how their definition of ‘family’ probably doesn’t involve sex, alcohol, gambling, or the sweet, sweet toke of God’s greatest of vegetation: the Tobacco Leaf.  But every now and again, I enjoy waxing philosophical about the deeper things in life.  Which, if any of a dozen different pop singers can be believed, revolves around all of those things.  Well, assuming of course, that you like to compare your mild tobacco fixation with the shotgun-to-the-face results of massive cocaine usage.  Probably not a good self-image, but necessary to elevate oneself to the heights of minstrelish wisdom.

Speaking of self-image, I don’t generally have a big fixation with my… ummm… manhood.  But I just finished a cigar called a Magnum.  As I was smoking, I couldn’t help but consider the sheer awesomeness of a word that has been used to describe phallic self-protection against zombie hordes,  phallic self-adoration in the campy Sci-Fi sense, and also large phallic things to put in ones mouth in an entirely heterosexual manner.  The last one means cigars.  The link doesn’t really have anything to do with it, except, I guess for the drama of suggesting that I’m as cool as *cough* Wierd Al.  Incidentally, the movie that’s the theme from is about the funniest I’ve seen.  It also deals with phalli at one point.  And the explosion thereof.

I won’t even go into Magnum Opus, Big Honkin’ Bottles of Wine, really old tv detective shows, cars, trucks, ice cream, or anything else inrinsically manly like that.  I just wanted to point out that despite my utter lack of inhibitions about the state of my attactively manly self, I am feeling even less inhibited after a nice heaping of lung cancer.

Incidentally, if you haven’t clicked on the condom link… do so.  Just not at work.  Unless you work someplace awesomely tolerant.  But at home, I suggest you do.  Especially you, Brianne, since apparently I’m writing this blog mostly for you.