Welcome Back, B!tches!

 

too busy making questionable fashion choices to write

 

Really, it's my own damn fault.

I can never quite get up the nerve (read: "Get off my lazy @$$") long-enough to remove this blog from the World Wide Web.  As a result, Mr. C keeps re-discovering it.  

Most-recently, he somehow started reading it with some dorm-mates.  Which resulted in him calling me on speaker phone a few weeks ago.

"Sooo," he said, "we were reading your blog..."

"Who was?" I asked.

"Me and the girls next door," he responded, completely blasé.

"You were?" I asked.  It seems like 18-year-old college students would have more-relevant things to read, but I wasn't about to complain.  I mean, a fan is a fan.  (Or several fans?  He was being evasive about just how many girls were participating in this book discussion.)

"Yeah," he said. "These girls wanted to know more about me." I was charmed that Mr. C chose to use my sophisticated, urbane writing to fill in the backstory of his biography.  And it was lovely to think I was inspiring these impressionable young women.  (Wait: was I becoming a . . . role model?)

"But we needed to know something," Mr. C continued.  I sat up straighter, waiting for the thought-provoking question my deep writings had aroused.  "What," he asked, "does 'Fickle Pickle' mean?"

"'Fickle Pickle'?" I asked, dumbfounded.  "As in, 'Fickle Pickle Fun'?" 

"Yeah," he said. "It's underneath all those photos of dishtowels.  What's it mean?"

I was a little disappointed.  "I don't know; I didn't make it up.  It's just the name of the dishtowel company."

I heard a chorus of "Aaahhs" from Mr. C and the two (three?) girls.

"Yeah," I said.  "Why?"  Then it occurred to me.  "Did you think it meant something sexual?"

"No," Mr. C sighed, used to me swinging this way whenever he asked a question.  The (four? five?) girls also seemed to sigh.  (They must have parents, too.)

"I mean, I suppose it COULD be sexual," I reflected.  "It does say 'pickle', and those pickles CAN, after all, be fickle..."  I was obviously not going to be their role-model, so I decided to just try to be 'relevant'.  "At least it was just a pickle and not an eggplant emoji."

Mr. C sighed again and the (six?) girls tittered, but Bee, listening to our conversation, broke in: "What's an eggplant emoji got to do with it?"

I rolled my eyes to show how out-of-touch he was, even though I was rolling my eyes for the sake of the teens who couldn't actually see me rolling my eyes.  "It means 'sex'," I explained.  "Or -- wait! -- it means 'penis'!"  Now I was thrown off.  "Is it 'penis'," I mused, "or is it 'ejaculate'?" 

Bee was officially disgusted with me, and the kids on the other end of the line had gone silent.  "Well," I finished lamely, "at least I know that the peach means 'booty'."

Mr. C finally cleared his throat.  "Well, what other blog posts should we read?" he asked.

I cheered a little.  "What, you want me to come up with a reading list?"

"Sure," he said, and there were mutters of assent from the hoard behind him.

"Ummm, well, let's see," I thought.  I headed to the basement to get the hardcopies of the blog that I'd had printed years ago.  "If you want funny ones about Baby Mr. C, there's always the one about the Tooth Fairy failure or the story about locking you in the crate at the Market." I flipped through the table of contents.  "Oh, I always liked the one about Dad dancing to 'I'm Sexy and I Know It." 

("What?!" exclaimed one of the cohort from the background.  "Oh, yeah, that IS a good one," Mr. C laughed.)

"Oooo," a title caught my eye, "or the anatomy talk where you said 'bagina'.  Or the one where you made me yell 'SEX' over and over in the grocery store."  I chuckled to myself.

(The phone had gone ominously silent.  "Who ARE you?" one of the harem finally muttered in the background.)

I snapped the book shut. "Or you could always read about when you sat on a cactus and thought I'd post the pictures to Craigslist." I sniffed.  I was obviously not going to be inspiring or relatable, so I'd just need to settle for being light entertainment.

"Ok, sounds good," said Mr. C, unaffected.

"Did you write down all those posts?  Want me to come up with a list of discussion questions?" I asked, semi-frostily.

"Nah, we got it," Mr. C breezed. "Love you!" And he hung up.

But the next day, he wrote me his longest text to date.  And it was really sweet and thoughtful, and basically said how he wants me to re-start this blog (yet-again).

 

He even volunteered not to read it for a year, if that's what it would take to free me to write honestly.  However, I have no shame, so I will put no restrictions on him (or any of his concubines he chooses to read this to.  HelloooOOOOooo, Ladies!)

However, I DID remind him that the whole reason I'd stopped writing the Blog For One was because (of laziness) I wanted him to be in charge of picking the topic and I just write about it, and he'd neglected that part of my stipulation.  He countered the next day with a list of topics about which I could write, starting with what it's like to be an empty-nester.

Sigh.  Someone is interested in me.  I am so put-upon.

Put down the remote and pack up the Ben and Jerry's: Mama's got to get to work.