because you suck half-orcish ass, and are not welcome here. quit polluting my cyberspace. you go now.
now, back in the day, when i had one kid and was planning on stopping at two kids, valentine’s day was cute. i realized this year that, with three kids in school, i was suddenly going to lose an entire day to the manufacture of v-day paraphernalia.
and no, i’m not some martha stewart hard-on handmade-cards-and-homemade-candy kind of psychopath pain in the ass. i’m talking about some rock-bottom, bare-minimum shit. seriously. at some point, i guess all the teachers of every grade school and preschool in town got together and decided that decorating a box to hold valentines was standard pre-v-day protocol. and you can’t just slap stickers and scribbles on a box. because where the fuck might one find a PLAIN box these days?!?! art is cheap in this country, and image is everything, meaning any decent-sized box is covered in slippery artwork of whatever shoes, diapers or beer used to inhabit said box. so only after taping some slabs of faded construction paper (i think the construction paper in this house, along with most of the spiral notebooks, were bought during my own childhood) in various shades of red, pink and white to some shoeboxes, covering them in the stickers that came with the boxes of cheap, shiny cartoon-character valentine cards, did we get to start putting together the actual valentines.
we made nearly 80 valentines today. my fingers actually hurt from the two pieces of tape per valentine to attach the candy. the whole thing was disconcertingly civilized… three little boys sitting around a table for two hours with glue and stickers and markers and shit. PINK stickers, and markers, no less. (i’m not saying i care. i’m saying THEY do. for the record, i think it would be great if they liked the color pink, barbie dolls, and any other gender-role-bucking thing they pleased. however, i didn’t just manage to have 4 boys, i managed to have boys so boyed-up they will plant their feet and HOWL if i so much as attempt to take them with me into “the pretty store,” which is what they call victoria’s secret. at the top of their lungs. every time we approach it. which happens all of twice per year as, stupid me, i attempt to redeem my semi-annual free panty coupon.)
i am contrasting this civilized afternoon with this morning’s first hockey practice for the twits. and by “contrast,” i mean “apples and tapeworm-ridden dogturds.” i don’t know why, after 8 years of this shit, i’m always surprised by their creativity…
dramaqueen is chaotic neutral. i am going gray at the mere thought of trying to get him through the next 13 years of public schooling.
(for those of you who can’t instantly rattle off the other eight choices besides “chaotic neutral”… this is the part where you go. you go now!)
so, if you’ve never taken the online alignment quiz, you should do so now… i think it’s actually fairly accurate.
this quiz put positiverolemodel at lawful good (which offends him mightily… he fancies himself chaotic good. ha! he only wishes he were that cool.) it pegged me as true neutral. now, a lot of DMs would caution you against trying to play a true neutral character, because it’s rather difficult to keep your actions true to that alignment. my last DM cautioned me against it… until he got to know me better. i am actually that kind of an inscrutable pain in the ass in real life, so playing one in the prime material plane is no big deal. i’m the mage/thief who will let the enemy prisoners go, steal from the nice rich man paying my mercenary ass, risk my life to save a member of my party, and leave another party member in the practically-unguarded rural jail if freeing him would interrupt my lunch, all in the same campaign. i rule!
i’ll spare monkeybeef the alignment assessment until some future date when he’s a little more in control of his own actions. spazmonkey, like his father, is lawful good. he may be noisy and goofy, but by god, that kid ALWAYS does what you tell him to do (even if he complains about it at length while doing it.) evilgremlin is lawful neutral… he may or may not do what you tell him to do, but either way, you’re damn well going to discuss why he should. in dork circles, this is known as a “rules lawyer.” then there’s dramaqueen. chaotic neutral. before we proceed, let me remind you that this is the kid who once crapped himself intentionally to get out of participating in a practice for the preschool christmas pageant. the kid who will say NO! to what i’m telling him to do… as he’s actually doing what i told him to do… just to be confusing.
so. hockey. signed the twits up for 3-4 year old hockey at the park district. because why not? the coach starts by asking each kid his or her name. spazmonkey answers the question correctly. dramaqueen answers by pointing to spazmonkey, saying, “his name is spazmonkey,” and then shifting his gaze to the far wall, perhaps hoping this will help him to stay unnoticed. yep. off to a good start!
okay, now of course, all the other kids are being goofballs, too. there’s the kid who answers with his name, his sister’s name, the name of his dog, and the rest of his (mercifully short) life history. there’s the kid who, when asked if she wanted a blue stick or a yellow stick, answers NO! and refuses to take any stick. there’s the kid who wouldn’t stand in line. the one who could not be convinced this was, in fact, hockey, and not baseball. et cetera. i wasn’t even worried when spazmonkey started twirling his stick like a double-bladed lightsaber (while dramaqueen, our beatbox-in-residence, helpfully sang darth maul’s theme), because two other kids were already having a lightsaber battle with theirs.
then there’s dramaqueen. he’s the one you see in the middle of the floor, with no stick. this is because he’s pretending to be an evil robot. thanks, dav pilkey! at least he wasn’t pretending to be a jurassic jackrabbit, instead.
here you see dramaqueen with the stick behind his back. it may look like he’s in line with the other kids, but he’s actually just near the line. actually, he’s deliberately directly in front of the line, blocking it. it’s a shame the photo couldn’t capture him doing his best daddy-baritone, yelling, “NONE SHALL PASS!”
next, you’ll just have to imagine him on the field as the other kids practice dribbling the balls from one wall to the other. i have no photo of him running around kicking the other kids’ balls. this is because i had put the camera down to go talk some sense into him.
also, when he was supposed to be doing stretches and warm-ups, he did some breakdancing. while singing the theme song to “cops.” i really have no comment on that. it kind of speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
