Welfareloser's Blog

no, i’m not saying i had pcp for breakfast again; that’s actually not word salad. i’m saying it’s really, really tough to to breathe when laughing that hard while watching a dvd of some bloodhound gang videos, and you watch foxtrot untiform charlie kilo over and over.

other gems with brilliant lyrics:
The Bad Touch – maybe it’s not that brilliant, but since PRM and i watched damn near every episode of X-Files together from season 2 until the bitter end (and then rewatched the entire show on dvd as soon as it ended, for a total of about 12 years of watching x-files with no lights on… we’re dans la maison… i hope the smoking man’s in this one. okay, wrong song) so we have a special place in our hearts for lyrics like “we’ll do it doggystyle so we can both watch x-files.”

the “rockin song with an uncomfortably wierd video concept” award goes to Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss. the concept here is simple: a bad pun. what if “The Viper Room” were “The Wiper Room?” well, hilarity would ensue! and if beautiful people waiting in line to get past the velvet ropes into a painfully hip giant bathroom didn’t make you uncomfortable, they threw in the extended glory-hole french kiss with a dog just for you!

honorable mention in this category goes to The Inevitable Return of the Great White Dope and Fire Water Burn.

the “sheen of euphemism as thin as an olsen twin’s bikini stretched over rush limbaugh’s butt and manboobies” award goes to the video that features a guy stealing a fish and running through the desert with it. you know. the video that gets introduced by a muppet. a clam muppet. with a beard. Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny.

the “not even trying to be euphemistic” award goes to the song written for a b-list pornstar, The Ballad of Chasey Lain.

ESPECIALLY my female friends. in fact all 3 or so of my female friends have one thing in common: they’re crazier than i am. for example, we went to a mexican restaurant around the corner with MyEvilTwin and TexasRoadKill last night. in the course of a story i was telling (the kind that had PositiveRoleModel telling me that i could be just as funny at a lower volume) i gave a description of a side-bar banner ad for a cartoon porn site. this may not be the exact wording, but i believe i called it “a 5-second repeating loop of movie of a big-titted ho bouncing and taking it in the pooper.” i demonstrated by slapping one of my hands against the other fist.

this earned me a horrified dirty look from a woman at the next table. she had apparently gotten bored with alternately scolding her 18-month-old every time he touched his food with his hands or raised his voice above a whisper, and giving me disapproving looks as i helped my 18-month-old shovel beans and rice in his mouth with my own bare hands, hung him upside down and threatened to “shake him stoopid” while he squealed, and gave him all the lime wedges out of our margaritas for him to eat, squeeze, or tear to shreds as he pleased.

so she stepped it up from “disapproving” to “trying to meet my eye so she could angrily stare me down” after listening in and failing to find the humor. i just gave her a super-sweet smile back and then ignored her, both because i am a pacifist (that’s pronounced “pussy”), and because i was happy to see her kid quietly spit some of his food out onto her plate while she was momentarily distracted from riding his ass.

(in the end, i feel sorry for her, because we went on to enjoy an evening of flavor-blasted ice cream at Dane’s Dairy, followed by beers and strings on the porch with RadHippie, while she no doubt finished off her day by bitching about her job and not having sex with her husband. i win!)

i leaned over to point out the angry look to MyEvilTwin, but she was already busily trying to burn a hole in the woman’s skull with her own pissed-off look. PositiveRoleModel missed the subtleties of the exchange of looks between the three of us, and asked MET what she was doing. her response was something like “hoping that bitch will decide she has to say something to us so i can BEAT. HER. ASS.” the fun part is that i’m pretty sure MET wasn’t quite kidding!

on the phone with JokerJitsu later that night, i described MET as “kinda like MeJane, only possibly crazier.” JokerJitsu said he’d have to see it to believe it. MeJane is married to one of PRM’s MD/PhD classmates, XBoxNinja. MeJane is an adorable little woman who might break 100lbs soaking wet. she has sent me pictures of her hamsters in her mouth, quit jobs with streams of profanity, and loudly proclaimed in a restaurant that, since it was next door to an abortion clinic, she’d play it safe and eat vegetarian that night. definitely scores higher on the “crazy shit to say really loud in a restaurant” scale than mine!

XBN and MJ were crazy enough to let PRM exercise his reverendship and marry them… MET and TRK are not only crazy enough to consider allowing him to do it for them, too, but also to consider (at least after a couple of margaritas!) letting me make their cakes. the bride’s cake will obviously be made of twinkies and dingdongs, because that’s how we roll. apparently, for the groom’s cake, TRK wants the armadillo cake – red velvet cake, gray icing, shaped like everyone’s favorite speedbump. of course, i plan to pimp it out a bit… it’s going to have a big black tire-track over its back, and the skull is going to be busted open, exposing a jello-mold brain inside the cake-head. with carrion-eating peeps pecking at it. seriously. it’s such a brilliantly conceived piece of performance art that it’s almost a shame they’ll probably have the sense to get a real cake. but hey, i think the rules are, if i get MET to agree to it a few more times, i think it becomes legally binding. a “21-beer contract,” we’ll call it!

speaking of crazy-ass homies, there may be a long break from the posting soon… our closest friends are still relatively close, all about 4 hours away. XBoxNinja and MeJane (northern illinois), and SlutMonkey (minnesota) are all coming for the 4th of July weekend. JokerJitsu (central illinois) is unfortunately getting screwed by the man eight ways from judgement day, and won’t be able to make it. which is probably the only reason why i’m fairly certain i’ll eventually heal up and get back to the blogging… with JokerJitsu, that would be ALL of the beloved med school homies together again, and i’m pretty sure that complete reunion of the Axis of Unhingedness would have caused tears in the fabric of space and time, and possibly some spontaneous human combustion.

then again, if we get the old homies together with the new homies, that may happen anyway. that, and strippers. definitely strippers.

this is a verbatim quote from SpazMonkey right before he shattered the shatterproof backboard on the skeeball lane at chuck e. cheese. just keepin it real.

so. we usually go to chuck e. cheese once or twice a year, and hadn’t been since i was morbidly pregnant with MonkeyBeef. a lot of parents can’t stand chuck e. cheese – and honestly, i’m surprised i’m not one of them. i hate crowds, especially crowds of poorly supervised children. EvilGremlin’s friend DayDreamer’s mom says her kids get so overstimulated there that DayDreamer shuts down, eyes glazed over, and his younger brother just runs in circles screaming. others are understandably annoyed by the barney-like characters and bad kid-music that plays non-stop. (then there are the pain-in-the-ass bitches who hate the fact that its not even *gasp* EDUCATIONAL. but luckily, we here at loser headquarters don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what the competitive type-A fuehrer-mommies think, and neither should you.)

anyway, the pizza is actually really good – it scores points for the crust actually tasting like yeast, being really light on the sauce, and having a ton of high-quality cheese on it. i like it, my kids like it. MonkeyBeef REALLY likes it; i think he ate as much of it as his brothers.

if you print out every reward chart and coupon on their website, and bring in report cards for additional free tokens, it winds up being a pretty decent deal: i usually go for the $40 pizza-soda-180-or-so-tokens deal, but splurged this time: for a total of just under $60, 5 of us stuffed ourselves on pizza, got 4 sodas, and 315 tokens, and some ice cream sandwiches and popsicles out of the $1 vending machine, AND got 3 hours of playtime. the place always opens at 9 am, so you can have the whole place practically to yourself, even in the middle of summer vacation, just by showing up for a pizza breakfast, and we’re out of there in time for naptime. the security is actually really good – i’ve never lost a kid in there, not even for a second; visibility is good, and the one exit is monitored by an employee at all times.

look at them not throwing feces! i cannot explain it, but magically, my children do not get overstimulated by chuck e cheese. (okay, so MB spent the last half hour running in a circle screeching, not even stopping to look at the games he was careening between. but hey, we’ll just go ahead and chalk that up to “wild abandon” rather than “overstimulation.”)

my kids also spend 75% of the time on non-video-game-like, non-ticket-dispensing pursuits, like the hamster-tunnel playground and air hockey:

they can also drop several dozen tokens on making funny faces at the “sketch your face, or the back of your head should you choose to smile sweetly at the camera until the last second when you jerk your head around” photo booth:

so, there are a lot of things i like about chuck e cheese, but the most important is this: i fucking ROCK at skeeball. my usual trick is to play several dozen games of skeeball to earn lots of tickets to make sure my kids get to pick out at least one modest prize each. they usually manage to average 1 to 2 tickets won per token spent; i can consistently clear 5 to 8 tickets per token i spend on skeeball. i once heard a mom complain that the prizes you can buy with the tickets you won are “cheap.” yes. when you spend 10 cents per token, and earn a minimum of 1 ticket per token spent… you’re not walking out of there with an xbox for 1000 tickets. on 200 tokens, we can usually clear 500 tickets, and the exchange rate seems to be roughly that 100-ticket value = $1. so we walk out of there with pirate eyepatches, stickers, play-doh, and a few pieces of candy.

this time, however, we found a game that must have been broken… it was one of those “aim the coin” variations; in this one, you turn the coin release platform to aim the coin to roll down a slope at any of a dozen holes, most of which are worth one ticket. in this particular game, the platform’s default position was aimed directly at the 10-ticket hole. if you didn’t touch it, you got ten tickets. as soon as i discovered this, i just started plugging coins in it and watching the tickets mound up on the floor. when the kids were ready to go, i had them come over and plug their remaining tokens in; you should have seen their faces light up at the piles and piles of tickets they got. when we were out, i showed another little girl how to do it, and she and her sister took over the machine with squeals of delight.

of course, i didn’t figure this out before playing many, many rounds of skeeball. MB loved the skeeball. the blinking lights, the different beepy pattern for each point level, and most of all, of course, the flying balls. he’s just learned to clap, so he got to clap a lot, pull out my tickets and stuff them in my backpack for me, and occasionally throw a ball really badly. for the most part, though, to keep him out of the way after he decided he was going to lebowski it up and run his ass up the ramp to personally deliver the balls to the holes, i held him on my left hip. so, 30 pounds of fatass in my left arm, leaning waaaaaaay to the right to keep my balance as i threw a skeeball a few hundred times, thus putting most of my weight on my right leg… i wound up with my left arm and right leg so sore i could barely move them for a few days. then, as i was getting the kids in the car, making sure everybody was out of the way before closing the back hatch of the van, i forgot to make sure *i* was out of the way, and slammed it down onto my right shoulder, thus taking 75% of my limbs out of commission. ow. the bruise is impressive. so’s the nerve damage!

i’m sure the machine will be fixed by the time we go back, but for once, we made out like carnie superheroes: 1400 tickets. the twins had both announced that they wanted a 300-ticket spiderman pouch at the outset, and i had told them we probably wouldn’t get enough tickets for two of them, even after EG offered to let them use his tickets. not a problem after all! after two spiderman pencil pouches, some playdoh, sticky hands, and pirate belt pouches full of jewels, the kids ran out of shit that they wanted and i had to pick out the last few hundred points worth of craptaculous plastic diversions.

so, awesome day out, the only casualties being 3 of my limbs, and my dress. i should have taken a picture. two soda spills, an ice cream smear, dozens of orange-cheese-grease smears, and some tootsie-pop-drool jackson pollocking. i actually made a point of getting changed before the neighbors saw me, because damn. they’re already working pretty hard to convince themselves i’m not smoking crack for lunch.

so there’s another family at the t-ball practices that i could have sworn i recognized, but, hey, we just moved here, so i couldn’t, right? wrong! not only did they used to live in urbana IL – in a neighborhood really close to ours – the dad graduated from the same MD/PhD program as PositiveRoleModel, and he’s now an ophthamology resident here. and this is how bad i am at face recognition: he was the resident who saw MonkeyBeef earlier in the year when i thought he had strabismus. “strabismus” is defined as “eyes that don’t look in exactly the same spot.” it requires medical treatment, possibly surgery. what MonkeyBeef has, however, is a non-problem that mimics strabismus, called pseudostabismus. “pseudostrabismus” is defined as “your eyes look unfocused, but actually you’re just struggling to look around that big nose!”

anyway. they’ve got 4 or 5 kids (who’s counting?!), all sweet and well-behaved and lots of fun, and roughly the same ages as ours, so we’ve been to not only the same t-ball for the 4-5 year-olds this spring, but also basketball and flag football for the 7-8 year olds last fall and winter, and god only knows how many other playgroups, sports, etc for the last 8 years. they’re funny as hell (the dad was pretty reserved the first couple of times we talked, but he loosened up quickly – like, some of the degenerate stuff he’s said in just the last couple of practices reminds me strongly of PRM) and it’s too bad we didn’t make them homies before now, but better late than never!

turns out their 8-year-old is a big pokemon fan like EvilGremlin, so EG really looks forward to the practices and games, and they sit and talk shop, or engage in a stream-of-consciousness dungeons-and-dragons-style pokemon battle. it’s a game EG has developed over the last year playing with the two girls who stay with their grandma next door after school: it seems to involve a loose accounting of hit points and damage points, and lots and lots of creative attacks and defenses that they act out while pretending to be various pokemon. EG and his new BFF also discovered another big-sibling pokemon fan at t-ball and pulled him into their game, improvising attacks like “poison crab apple throw” and “thunderfart.” and they’ve all promised to bring their pokemon cards to next week’s games and practices. i think we’re going to be starting up a weekly pokemon trading card game night in the loser household here soon.

but back to the tball. there’s lots of running to the wrong bases, forgetting to throw the ball to first base after catching it, dogpiles of every fielder trying to catch the ball, etc… i’m trying to talk DramaQueen out of his new bright idea, which is to interrupt his run to first base to grab the ball he just hit and throw it to the first baseman if his/her teammates aren’t quick enough to do so. but hey, the coach has yet to take a bat to the nutsack, so you won’t be seeing us on america’s funniest home videos! yet! there’s still three weeks left, and he’ll have to let his guard down eventually! i mean, 2 balls vs. 10 preschoolers with bats? not good odds.

EG’s pokemon homies are in the foreground. EG moved out of the frame at the last second to dig for candy in my backpack.

if i can keep up with the daily practice for the next 20 years or so.

http://www.steppininit.com/

if you live in michigan, you win. seriously. go see these guys. otherwise, buy the cd’s. and if you don’t like the music, screw you. you are officially banned from welfareloser.com. i’ll block your IP, bitch. don’t even make me.

since this year’s big-ass fly-fishing trip is going to be to sweden rather than the usual michigan trip, i’m officially starting a second-hand campaign of annoyance to get them to play a show in iowa. a musician/neighbor/friend/kid’s-friend’s-mom around the corner is the sister of the twin pickers in the band, and introduced me to their music. hey, if i’m annoying enough, maybe she’ll beg them on my behalf to play a show around here just to shut me up. holy crap, i wish i could project that kind of soul onto my banjo. someday!

and don’t go tellin me all it takes is hard work and scale etudes. that’s like tellin a fat bitch to eat less and exercise. it’ll only make me meaner.

it’s indiana jones season, after months and months of really fun hype… some lego indiana jones minigames that the boys unlocked on their lego star wars wii game, some really awesome indy lego sets, some burger king toys… the twins, especially, have really gotten into indiana jones. they’ve spent the last several months in their dad’s old indiana jones hat, making whips out of blankets, etc, without ever having seen any of the original trilogy. so i didn’t even recognize the impending “twinkle twinkle little star = the ABC song” epiphany until i sat down to breakfast this morning with SpazMonkey, who must have finally seen a trailer for the new indy movie while surfing youtube or something (now that they can read and write, one of the twits’ favorite things to do is sit down at my laptop, bug me to open up youtube, and type in things like “lego star wars” or “particle man” or “brass monkey” and laugh their butts off at the wierd stop-motion movies nerds like them make.) after i got through some coffee and waffles, i realized that SpazMonkey was just sitting there staring at a couple of lego figurines. like, sitting there QUIETLY. seriously, after he got through his “but what’s gonna happen if i DO?” 300 times a day phase, he spent a solid month or so asking how to spell just about every word he heard. now that’s passed, and we’ve moved onto him asking the definition of every word he hears, to the point that i’m about to buy the boy an encyclopedia. and beat him with it.

he was so awed that he WHISPERED the entire conversation:

SM: mom!
me: what?
SM: indiana jones and han solo are the SAME GUY!

i take a closer look at the lego figurines before him: one indiana jones, one han solo. they’re standing nose to nose.

me: are they talking to each other?
SM: yeah!
me: what are they saying?
SM: they’re saying… “duuuuuuuuude!”

once again, you are missing the pornographic joy of factory fresh reese’s peanut butter cups delivered direct to your door the day after they were manufactured. pornographic, dude. best $32 you could ever spend.

faggot. *

sincerely,

welfareloser

* i regularly donate money to the human rights campaign, an organization dedicated to equality for all people regardless of their position on the gender or sexuality spectrum. i have gay pride symbols on my bumper. i think it’s important for an obviously (mostly) heterosexual woman to show her support for the cause of all de facto families being granted the same legal and social rights as traditional ones. also? i find the word “faggot” funny. it’s part social satire, in which i am actually making fun of the people who use the word faggot with revulsion and venom, and part “bad words, like farts, are wicked funny.” my political stance… my choice of epithets. incongruous? possibly. but did i mention i was true neutral? seriously. think about it. it totally fits.

cousins, 2nd cousins, cousins however-many-times-removed, siblings, step-siblings, half-siblings… it’s fambly.

ooooh, caffeine-free cola? WE FUCKED UP NOW, YO!

hide n seek is hard when you forget how many second cousins you’re supposed to find:

PositiveRoleModel and EvilBigMouth holding down chairs at the bar:

so my 4 cousins – BigBird, Lurch, MoonDog, and Tweety – who organize this yearly bash of smoked chicken/turkey, grilled meat, charity raffle, canned food drive, semi-feral children, and kegs – each have baseball jerseys for the event. note the numbers. their significance was explained to me, and i promptly forgot. 143, 6-7/8, 00… and i forget the 4th one; i think it might actually be a normal number.

DAMMIT, DADDY, I KNOW THEY HAVE MORE OF THE SQUEEZY FUN JUICE POUCH THINGIES BEHIND THE BAR!

the youngest of Tweety’s four girls, who’s about MonkeyBeef’s age. their mommy dressed all four of them in tie-dye to maximize their visibility in the sea of children. if i didn’t live in such a hippie town myself, it’d be a trick worth borrowing!

SpazMonkey, EvilGremlin and Opa playing the hot new lawn game this summer. i’ve forgotten the name of it, so i will call it “special olympics jarts”:

Tweety’s 3 oldest daughters, one of MoonDog’s daughters, and SpazMonkey cautiously approach the pool, but don’t get in until Lurch’s daughter proves it’s not freezing cold. she’s 10, and taller than me. did i mention that lurch is 6’7? did i also mention that we really are related for real? by, like, genetics?

EG doing the wet undies jig:

MonkeyBeef hopped in on uncle ChickenHawk’s lap:

…without bothering to change into a swim diaper first. you know what swim diapers do? they DON’T absorb liquid. this prevents cases of swole-butt like you see here:

also? it puts the “p” in “pool.” but hey, they do fit tightly enough to keep turds from floating out, and 1 out of 2 ain’t bad!

note the other diapered boy-butt in the pool, belonging to MoonDog’s youngest son. who is 3 months older and 3x bigger than my youngest son. i’ll quit harping on this point soon, but seriously, they don’t make heels high enough to make me blend in at my own fambly reunion.

DramaQueen running back for more wetness:

the barbecue pit/beer pavilion:

DramaQueen asking Tweety why he set the food on fire. also, my knees. because PositiveRoleModel is artsy like that.

Opa, EvilBigMouth and PhillyCheeseSteak playing horseshoes:



SpazMonkey: “I’M NOT CHEATING I’M HELPING!”

bubbles:

parachute:

DramaQueen’s trip to the ladies room. our conversation consisted mostly of some variation on “are you done yet?”/”nope, not yee-eeeeet!” hence the several dozen pictures like this:

next massive post… preschool t-ball!

okay, bitches… my camo pants are no longer falling off my butt, my kid can’t pull my skirts off trying to climb back up into my uterus, and i have two swimsuits that fit… now that the sewing’s done, and i’m up at 2 AM, i’ll finish up the last two picture-saturated posts and get back to usual one-liner nonsense.

so. we went to the st louis zoo. largest free zoo on the planet, and still fun after probably 50+ lifetime visits. we didn’t do the japanese tourists’ 17-countries-in-5-days thing, cracking the whip to make sure we saw every exhibit (with pictures of ourselves in front of each and every one!) we saw penguins, monkeys, and bugs. mostly bugs. in fact, while PRM took the three younger kids to the monkeys, i stayed for an extra half hour in the butterfly pavilion with EG, who had just finished up a 2nd grade science unit on caterpillars/butterflies, and had just acquired (yay, goodwill! 88 cent books rule!) an audubon field guide to north american butterflies and moths. he spent a good half-hour chatting with some other random grade schoolers (many of whom had also just completed a science unit on butterflies) by a display of cocoons and chrysalises, poring over his book with some the other excitable science nerds to identify what they saw emerging. then it was on to the butterfly pavilion, where we stalked the wildlife for pictures and made more new nerd friends.

not much in the way of pictures, since they hardly held still…

DramaQueen: “hey mom? can i jump in the fountain puddle? what happens if i do? i’m not gonna be in trouble, right?”

“hell yeah i want cheezy poofs!”

SpazMonkey: “INSECTS HAVE SIX LEGS AND EVEN IF IT LOSES TWO LEGS IN A FIGHT WITH A CENTIPEDE IT’S STILL AN INSECT BECAUSE IT USED TO HAVE SIX LEGS, AND BUTTERFLIES HAVE FOUR LEGS BUT THEY’RE STILL INSECTS AND THEY DON’T FIGHT WITH CENTIPEDES BECAUSE THEY JUST FLY AWAY AND CAN WE HAVE ICE CREAM BECAUSE CENTIPEDES CAN’T FLY, RIGHT DAD?”

scorpions:

future president of the “see, entomologists CAN get laid, and we’ll prove it soon!” club:

big-ass atlas moth by EG:

soggy MonkeyBeef (please note that the only crying he did was when we tried to cover his ass with a poncho. he likes the rain, thank you very much…and, yeah, he still wants cheezy poofs, goddammit):