#MyWeirdFear

Have you seen the #MyWeirdFear segment on The Tonight Show?! Basically Jimmy Fallon asks his audience to share their phobias using the #MyWeirdFear hashtag and then reads them out loud on the show.

It’s hilarious, natch, and makes you realize what a bunch of wackjobs there are in the world – or at least in Jimmy Fallon’s audience.

Not to be outdone, I surveyed my own family about their weird fears and here’s what we’ve got on this end…

Sonny is worried that a stranger might step on his head.

Yep, that’s pretty weird. And it might explain why he hasn’t been having that great of a time in high school: Too many strangers whose feet you have to keep your head away from! A lot of pressure there.

Sissy is worried that someone passing over our house in an airplane will be able to look through her bedroom window and see her naked.

Well that’s weird too. And basically impossible. While a stranger COULD step on your head, I’VE never seen anyone naked in THEIR bedroom from MY airplane window. In general, though, getting dressed far enough away from an open, unshaded window makes a lot of sense because drones with cameras, duh. I explained all of this to Sissy and I think she has a new weird fear now; You’re welcome, Sweetie!

So far so good in holding our own against Jimmy Fallon’s audience. Now on to Hubby who is the most calm, cool and collected person I know. Almost like he’s deliberately and permanently lowered his heart rate in preparation for a record breaking free dive. So he has no weird fears. None. Snooze, where’s the fun in that?! Also don’t go see The Tonight Show, Hubby. You won’t be welcome there.

And since Hubby is so rational and low key, I’m forced to carry twice the crazy load to balance him out. I’m also twice as fun but who’s counting? So I have two #MyWeirdFears to confide here.

The first one is that the black garbage bag you periodically see on the side – or God forbid, the middle – of the road has a dead baby in it. Gah, I know!! Isn’t it awful??! It’s so awful, but I give those bags wide berth. You should too. And I think I just invented a few new hashtags called #MyHorrificFears, #MyReallyReallyHorrificFears, #MyUnbelievablyAwfulFears.

Now to lighten the mood, I will share with you my other weird fear – which is that a hand lives under my bed and will one day trip me in the middle of the night when I’m going to the bathroom. If I step too close to the bed as I’m getting out, it will grab my ankle and face plant me (and then most likely crawl on my face). However, through constant, long term  diligence, I’ve been able to outsmart it every night of my life by taking a biiiig step out of bed. Big enough so I’m outside of grabbing distance. Yep. Nope, just a hand, and clearly a dumb one at that if I’m able to outsmart it with the oldest “hand under my bed” avoiding trick in the book!

So there you have it. Pretty weird, huh? Jimmy Fallon – you should totally have your people call my people. There’s a lot more material where that came from.

Back to School (Part 2)

Sissy celebrated her new highschool junior ID badge by deconstructing her facial features and pointing out all the flaws of each. This is a fun pastime. You should try it right before you take the phone call from your future self and the stern talking-to that comes with it telling you that you are one-of-a-kind and beautiful in your uniqueness. 

When she got to the part where her forehead was too high, I could sympathize. Not that her forehead is really too high, but mine definitely is.

Enough about Sissy; back to me. Do you know how I addressed my too-high forehead back in highschool? In the 80’s??

With a little invention called the whispie bang.

And because I lived in New Jersey (which everyone knows is the starting point of all amazing hair) I had to completely bastardize the bangs from their original feather lite kiss of hair into a shellacked tube of brown perched on my forehead. I mean, it was basically like having the cardboard center from the toilet paper roll taped to my forehead day in and day out. Same size, same shape and it didn’t even move during soccer practice. That’s how you know Aqua Net won the hairspray wars and contributed to the collapse of the ozone layer.

Are you now picturing a dozen girls running around a soccer field with cardboard toilet paper tubes taped to their foreheads? Because you should be.  That’s exactly what soccer practice was like in highschool in the 80’s.  Side note: we only had those yellow phones on the walls with the looooong, curly cords so it was extremely hard for our future selves to call and say, “No.  Just…no.”

However, this low-riding hair tube clearly had the dual positive side effect of a) masking where my forehead actually started and ended or that I even had a forehead, while b) making the rest of my hair look very tall, which may have also been because the rest of my hair WAS very tall. And curly.  Very, very curly.   But not my bangs.  They were straight because I blow-dried them that way around my ginormous round hair brush and then topped that treatment off by using my curling iron on them.  Tube-alicious.  And if you ran at just the right angle, you could make the wind whistle through them on the soccer field.

I explained the whispie bang scenario to Sissy in a brainstorm-y way (no bad ideas) for how she could address her own forehead if she felt it was too high. To which she replied, “I just feel like if no one ever did whispies again, we’d all be safe.”

Hmmm. Good point.  But where’s the fun in that?

PS – My Darling Daughter, this is going to be one heck of a year! You are beautiful inside and out. You are incredibly smart, know all about math and are an amazing athlete with legs for miles.  State tennis champ and varsity softball player, all your bits and pieces work together to create an amazingly lovely whole. And when it comes to your face, you are “on fleek” with your plush lips and your Megan Markle freckles. And when you well, and me, it was my idea, no bad ideas in brainstorming remember single-handedly bring back the whispie bang?!? TRIFECTA!!!

Back to School (Part 1)

It’s been many moons since I waxed poetic about Kohl’s. So it’s about time I did some more o’that.

Kohl’s, I freakin’ love you!!!

What inspired my articulate and heartfelt love proclamation this time around you ask? No, not the 30% off coupon that still netted us $30 in Kohl’s cash plus an additional $10 in Yes2You Rewards. Though that’s all pretty suh-weet!

Instead it was the darling college gal at the checkout who rang up Sonny’s back to school threads.

You see, we struggled all summer long trying to get Sonny to read A Separate Peace and to do his geometry math assignment in plenty of time so that he wasn’t squeezing all the work into – and therefore ruining – my sanity and the final week of summer break. When the cashier got that whole story out of Sonny (well, and me because I’m helpful that way) by asking if he was ready for freshman year, she made a frowny face and exclaimed, “Oh no! You never, EVER wait until the last minute to do your summer assignments!! Doesn’t it just make you almost sick to your stomach having that hanging over your head?! Like, you’ll be at the pool with your friends and then you’ll suddenly remember your summer assignments and it just ruins the whole vibe, right??! I mean, even in college, when I get an assignment that’s not due until the end of the semester, I still have to start working on it right away because NOT working on it is way too stressful!”

Sonny’s side-eyeing me the whole time the college gal is monologuing with a look that said, “How are you doing this?! How are you making YOUR words come out of HER mouth?? Do you somehow KNOW her? Did you arrange this before we even GOT here?! Am I being punked into doing my summer assignments by my own MOTHER and a Kohl’s cashier??”

No, I’ve never seen this gal before in my life. But she is truly a blessing from Heaven. It was like a back to school Chicken Soup for the Soul moment since she eventually had Sonny smiling, nodding and agreeing that yes, indeed, doing summer homework ASAP made the most sense in the world.

And wouldn’t you know? Sonny went right home and plowed through his math and reading and wrapped up both with a full week of summer to go!  Phew!

Kohl’s employs angels in disguise, yo! You should totally go there for your back to school shopping.