Death By Skeleton Key

The Funniest Women on the Planet

Some kids are fine left alone for a few minutes. They occupy themselves and you can go do what needs to get done.

Yeah. I wasn't one of those.

I tell you about the plight that befalls the unattended, in my monthly column, Memoirs of My America , featured today at FunnynotSlutty . Posting of my childhood misadventures -- about the days of figuring out life in America as a kid from another country -- is something I look forward to each month at FunnynotSlutty.

I hope you stop over and read my tale today, of The Unattended, and maybe you have a child like this? One who should never be left unsupervised.

*I've been blessed with a mini-me: my third boy who goes by the name of Auggie.

Awesome Drawings

Long overdue, but he was loving his summer. A post today from our youngest, "Baby E." His art sketch book is his source of pride, and the thing he wants to share with you. Thank you all so much for indulging him.
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I like the name of this post because the name says it all. See these pictures? I drew them over the summer in the art sketch book my mom gave us on the first day of summer. They are so good you might say "he traced them." I did not trace over them or anything. All of them are from my imagination, from games I like.

I hope you like them. I'm going to caption them. Like my inspiration for them. (The order you look at them doesn't matter.)

I thought this real life bee was really cute when I was really young and so I picked it up and tried to pet it and it stung me on my thumb. I drew this picture after that and called it Evil Bee. Cuz it was. It was an evil bee.

This is this game I like to play on the computer called Bloons Tower Defense 5. It's on NinjaKiwi (like the bird). It's this game where's these balloons that come and the monkeys try to defend their village from the balloons. They make darts and tacks and surprise contraptions to shoot at the balloons and pop them. It's really fun. But tell your kids to NEVER click the ads or the videos.

I like to make these things called Chibis. They're really cool. They're like these really cute things. Sometimes I go the extra mile and make them really awesome. Then I show them to my family and ask them what they think and the stuff I wrote around this Chibi is the stuff my family said. This is one of those ultimate Chibis.

I made up this race of aliens called Geokranians and they're like really buff and have all these built-in cool weapons and stuff and they have a pharaoh instead of a king, which is really cool. The pharaoh has two guards who are really cool, and this is one of those guards. The Geokranians are really mutated so they can pop out arms if they need an extra arm like human Transformers. They can mutate wings out of their backs and turn their hands into guns. And their babies are angry caterpillars and can mutate tusks out of their mouths. (I love these guys)

This is from another computer game I like to play but not so much anymore because I'm older but it's pretty good if you're nine and below because they have captures and special missions and stuff. I may not like the game anymore but I still really like the guys so I still draw pictures of them. It's called Moshi Monsters. These two guys' names are Jeepers and Shishi.

And one more.

You know those Geokranian guys up there? Another cool thing is they have this cool awesome huge-like beast god sort of thing that lives in the middle of their planet and it's incredibly powerful and it itself is as big as 3 suns. It's huge and whenever the world's in trouble this thing comes out and just destroys whatever bad thing it is. I made his name up, too.

That's some of the stuff I drew over the summer. It was fun to show you and especially to write the captions. I think this is one of my best posts ever.

It was a long summer.

Bye.

ICYMI

Signs of the apocalypse: I've got my In Case You Missed It up on a Sunday. Before noon. Hide your kids, hide your loved ones, that fireball from the sky is coming down fast.

Here's the best of what I found on the internet this week:

--A few weeks ago, I saw this tweet sent out: "Jerry Seinfeld's newest: Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Must watch." And it is; each vignette about 8 minutes or so of you being able to eavesdrop on what funny people are like when they get together. The episode with Brian Regan, one of the funniest in stand-up, had me smiling from ear to ear (I love Brian anyway ...)

--I know I've talked about Marinka from MotherhoodinNYC oh ... about fifty times already, but truly, if you're not familiar with this blogger, then you're missing out on someone who has perfected the craft of  "the small." Marinka can pack a post in less than three or four paragraphs with all the ingredients of fine writing: interest, capture, pique, taking us there, and then the killer closer. She is one of the most easily identifiable voices on the internet; see for yourself here with her latest: "12 Things I Learned While White Water Rafting." (you can send me emails of thanks at my contact address above)

--I subscribe to storyfix.com , an excellent online resource for novel/short story writing tips and fundamentals. This piece here, on deconstructing story structure, is a keep-for-always post: "The Story Structure Demystified." Essential how-to of drawing a reader in.

--And some news we can celebrate when it happens to someone who deserves it: A book deal! See who's the latest to have landed something sweet: so very happy for you, dear lady. Much overdue and can't wait to read it.

Happy reading and enjoy your Sunday!

Anger, We Haz It

Facts of Life: if you are or have ever been a human being, you may have had moments in your life of anger so intense you feel mind-leaving-body, and you are witness to the separation.

Like eyes rolling around in your head and steam coming out of your nose like a stomping bull white hot anger. Feelings boiling over like a screaming tea kettle on the stove, and what do you do with yourself? Especially if these emotions overtake you at a less than opportune time: say half the town watching?

My post today, brought to you by Aiming Low, because they love to help: "What To Do With Your Strong Feelings."*

*Ignore them maybe they'll go away, is not one of my suggestions.  

Hero Stories

There is a scene in the luscious 1992 film, The Last of the Mohicans that, when I'm in the mood for a good cry and want to be swept away by the beauty of selfless heroic acts (like any normal person is), I pull it up on youtube and hit replay again and again.

This movie has one of the most epic endings you'll ever see, where a character named Uncas, playing the younger brother in the story, puts his life out there for the taking, to save a young girl, Alice, from being captured by the Huron tribe. Uncas doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of taking this entire band of brothers on as he fights them one by one along the edge of a massive, jagged, slippery waterfall cliff, but he's going to go down trying.

In less than four minutes, this scene has me jumping over the promontory, right after Uncas' tumble, crying, "Uncas! Uncas! Take me with yoooooooouuuuu!"

The thing about a hero is the powerful emotion they bring out in us as we see them override every bit of survival instinct we're born with and do what they have to do, because heroes can't not do anything.

Last night, after spending 20 minutes in a soul feeding cry over my Uncas, I sat in the dark living room, sobbing about pure and perfect love. Not the kind of love that movies try to push on us as real, but THIS kind: the kind that blows your heart out of your chest with doing anything to save someone -- and nothing in it for you. 

In between heaving gasps, for some reason, my mind reeled back to when my first baby was three-months-old.

He was a spring baby and we were out for an early evening walk. I would push him in his green stroller, explaining everything in the world to this baby --  the one I had waited for my entire life. We were on a bike trail and up ahead I saw a man walking a big dog, which he did not have on a leash, approaching from the opposite direction. I saw the dog startle suddenly, then head for us in bounding leaps, barking loudly, his eyes fixed on the green stroller. The one with my baby in it. I heard the man shout out his dog's name and he may as well have been screaming in a wind tunnel, his dog didn't hear a damn thing.

If there is anything that makes the hair prickle on my scalp and give me wobbly knees, it's a hound on the loose. I've been like that since a Great Dane knocked me flat on my back when I was seven-years-old. While I don't hate dogs, until proven otherwise, I am skittish around them.

Putting aside the terror of knowing that in less than three seconds there would be a bear of a dog that I was scared out of my gourd about, right at my feet, I jumped to the front of the stroller -- barely getting there before this canine did. With the dog howling furiously, I stepped in between him and the stroller, his nails scratching my legs. He growled deep in his throat, and that scared me more than the barking. The dog tried to get around me and at my stroller, and even though the man was still calling his name and trying to catch up to him, it wasn't fast enough for me. I was wearing clogs that day, and I pulled one off my foot and held it in my shaking hand until that perfect moment when the barking dog's jaws were as open as they could be, and I plunged my shoe into his mouth, in full combat assault.

Crazy, I know. The owner thought so, too. I knew the dog could've bitten some nasty holes into my quaking hand with those long teeth of his but I had to risk it. It's not that I transcended all fear or didn't care about pain -- believe me, I was light-headed from being so scared -- but he wasn't getting at my baby.

I hadn't thought about this day in years, and it made me think of how we -- how all of us out here -- have had moments of cape-wearing epicness where we toss aside our risk of injury to save another.

When my son woke up this morning, I told him this story. He had no idea that I had once been his Uncas, taking on that Huron tribe one by one along the precipice for him. It felt good to tell my tale and to hear myself say it.

So very many times in our lives, we recall our failures, our less than stellar moments, the times we wimp out instead of standing up. But we let the memory of our heroic acts fall away into some abyss, as if they were not the spectacular things that they are.




While I love this scene here from The Last of the Mohicans, today I want to hear your hero stories, because I'm a sucker for bawling my eyes out from the clear beauty of moments where we're larger than life.

Would you gift me with your hero story? Either a paragraph in comments, or write up your hero moment on your blog and come back and leave me the link?

From what I know and have seen of all of you, I'm positive you've got some four-hankie-tales from the prize archives of your beautiful lives.

I would be so honored to learn more about you; let me get swept away by your retelling of that brilliant time you took on that tribe along a cliff.

Thank you.