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Season One, Episode Thirteen: Musings of a Night Owl

Posted in Comedy, Humor, Random, Writing by

Hello. My name is Lashawn, and I am a night owl.

It’s four am, and what am I doing? Am I sleeping? Noooo. I’m sitting at my laptop in my badass penguin pajamas, playing with the Biblical Curse Generator. I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty entertained. It might be because it’s four in the morning, it might be because I’m slightly jacked up on caffeine, it might be because I enjoy the simpler things in life, I don’t know. What I do know is that the shit this site is coming up with is cracking me up. For example:

“May you see your pomegranates wither, O thou dabbler in abominations!”

Take that, guy who wanted to argue with me over the price of his oil change.

Staying up late opens your eyes to a whole new world dominated mostly by network syndicated comedies (such as How I Met Your Mother and That 70’s Show) and cheesy yet überslick infomercials for hair removal products and weird spandex bra shaper things that I don’t really need. Late nights make you feel classy, like you’re better than all the people who fell asleep during CSI: Miami. Horatio Caine peers at you over the top of his sunglasses and salutes you my friend, because you stayed up long enough to see him catch the bad guy and utter some really horrible and cheesy dialogue before and after he handcuffs said villainous villain. It’s a twofer kind of thing.

Horatio Caine: "There will be no tying of virtuous young maidens to any railroad tracks on my watch, evil silent film guy." Dastardly Evil Guy: "Curses, foiled again!"

Sleep? Ha, who needs sleep.

Sleep is overrated.

People often ask me why I stay up until the birds are chirping. I say why not? I work in the afternoon, my life is pretty boring…so why the hell not? I would much rather stay up late than wake up early in the morning, if that makes any sort of sense. I’ve always been a night person, even when I was a young lass. Nighttime is me time. I can shut off the Lashawn that the rest of the world gets to see and get in my pajamas and be the Lashawn who enjoys aloneness and contemplation and a good book or a corny sitcom.

I like the quiet, the solitude of what Robert Louis Stevenson called “the black hours”. I like that I can just sit and think and not have to be a mom or a sister or a receptionist or a friend or a daughter or anything that everyone else wants me to be. I can just be me, and not have to worry about what the rest of the world thinks. I can read random crap on Wikipedia or research the French Revolution or watch an old show from the ’50s. I can sit around with my favorite fleece blanket and eat Tostitos and salsa and not have to share. I can sit on my upstairs porch and just look up at the night sky and feel so infinitely insignificant and think philosophical things. It’s my favorite time of day, hands down.

To me, the night is beautiful, in some ways just as beautiful as the daytime, in other ways possibly more. One of my favorite things ever is when the sun sets and there’s this smooth, seamingless transition of blues and purples and pinks across the sky, from east to west. Simply beautiful. I adore the stars, and I think the twinkling, sparkling “heavens” are just as breathtaking as the white clouds across a vivid blue mid-afternoon sky. You can’t appreciate the sunshine without the inkiness of night. Sunrise wouldn’t be as memorable without the sunset. I’m suddenly reminded of one of my favorite quotes:

“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness so I can see the stars.”

Season One, Episode Three: Alaska, Chocolatey NFL Caketastic Deliciousness, and Tornadic Tubby Time

Posted in Parenting, Random, Uncategorized, Writing by

Today was a blissfully boring day.

I worked six hours today, filing all alone in an empty office.  I know it sounds boring, but I love it.  My favorite part of my job is when all the other girls in the office have gone home and it’s just me and my thoughts and a nice playlist that I burned playing in the CD player.  I’m a social person, I love being around people and laughing and joking and having a good time, but I also enjoy having time to myself where I’m not subjected to country music and gossip about relationships and stuff that bores me.  I’ve always been like that, to be honest, I prefer to be alone in my room with a book and music in the background when I’m not out being the social butterfly that society expects of me.  I also prefer to go out places with Nicky and my mom now more than I do with my friends.  It’s weird, but maybe that’s part of getting older.  Maybe you develop more of a chill, homebody side as the years go by?  I don’t know.

After work, I came home and watched football with my dad and ate cookies and nachos and this sinfully delicious chocolate cake–and I feel ridiculously stuffed and sluggish at the moment.  Nicky came in and sat next to me, and we watched TV with his head resting on my arm all evening until it was bath time.  Bath time is actually a lot more fun now that he’s older.  I liked “bubble tubbies” when he was smaller, but he keeps more of the bathwater actually in the tub now, and he likes to wash himself up and wash his own hair.  Next thing I know he’s going to be shaving, hahaha.  I love that he still calls his bath a “tubby” 🙂  After his bath, I put on his favorite DVD, that show Storm Chasers, and we snuggled up on the couch until he fell asleep in my lap.  In our house, we all know that Storm Chasers = Nicky is sleepy.  He usually won’t make it through an entire episode.  It’s actually kind of odd that my son watches a storm about chasing tornadoes to fall asleep.  He’s my silly silly boy…Although weather intrigues me, and we will go out on our porch and watch huge storms roll in, so he probably got that from me, along with his love of cake and staying up late…and his sense of humor, his blue eyes, and his goofy, lovable smile.  He’s definitely his mommy’s baby.

I’m currently in my pajamas, typing away at my keyboard in between texting one of my bestest friends, Destinie.  After I’m done with this mindnumbingly boring entry I plan on brushing my teeth and curling up in bed with my favorite book, Looking For Alaska (by John Green) until I fall asleep.  I was reading Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, but the story of Chris McCandless pisses me off and I’m not in the mood to ponder the sanity or motives of McCandless tonight.  I will blog about him another day, because I could write an entire post on him and how I can’t figure out if he was an idealist that we all should respect to some degree or if he was a spoiled rich brat who wanted to rebel against societal norms and his parents.

Goodnight, and here’s to another blissfully uneventful tomorrow to make me smile 🙂

XOXO

Season One, Episode Two: Robot Cockroaches, Minty Face Masks, and Target Teen Mom Shenanigans

Posted in Parenting, Random, Technology, Toys, Uncategorized by

My blog would like to thank you for calling it back in a timely manner. It wants to tell you that it didn’t wait by the phone at all. Well…maybe once or twice it checked the caller ID to see if you may or may not have called. Simply because it was in the shower and didn’t want you to think it was ignoring you.

So, I am sitting here at my trusty laptop, my face slathered in Mask of Magnaminty from the ever wonderful LUSH, fresh from playing with Nicky and his newest little toys, these little robotic bugs called Hexbugs. They’re actually kind of cute (see photo below), and Nicky wants to get more from Target the next time we go. I like them because they teach him science in a fun way (he remembers when we went to the Robots exhibit at the Great Lakes Science Center a few years back, and was telling me all about robots earlier tonight), and they are fairly inexpensive. As a mother with a ridiculously low-paying job, you can’t beat that.

These are Hexbugs. They look like little robotic bugs, and they scuttle about like motorized cockroaches. Sounds gross, but they are actually kind of cute. Nicky named them Speedy and Follow.

Today was a wonderfully quiet one. I took the day off from work, relaxing and spending time with Nicky instead of working for ten long hours. We laid around for a good part of the day, then went to Target and the grocery store, which is always fun and excruciating, depending on Nicky’s particular mood when we go to Target. This shopping trip was okay, although Nicky seemed to decide to bring his outdoor voice inside and thought it’d be best to be smart-mouthed. I may or may not have gotten angry with him and gotten the Look from one of my mom’s old friends. I didn’t spank him or yell at him, but he was being an unruly boy who was probably tired of sitting in the cart section of the shopping cart (it’s easier to keep him in the cart still, especially since he’s six and easily distracted…Target has a large toy department and has a Halloween section set up already–he stays in the cart for both of our sakes), and got antsy and mouthy. I may have snapped at him to shut his mouth because I didn’t want to hear it. And this lady overheard me and so I got the Look. I loathe the Look. I was nineteen when I had Nicky, and I have gotten the “you young mothers don’t know crap about raising children and that’s the problem with teen moms” kind of look since he was born. I am funny about the term “teen mom” in my case. I was nineteen, yes, but I had already graduated from high school and was technically a legal adult. So yes, I was a teenager, but I wasn’t in the kind of category that would land me on a MTV reality show or as a real statistic worth studying. To older people who need to mind their own damn businesses, however, I am a teen mom who shouldn’t have had a kid because I suck at parenting. I guess they either never had children or forgot what it’s like to be a parent of a small child. I usually ignore them, but the Look I got tonight really stuck with me for a while. She looked at me like I was the worst mother ever and that I had no business with a child–I had the misfortune of being in the same aisle as her when Nicky had a minor meltdown about Hot Wheels last week at Target. Mind you, he’d been up over twelve hours that day because of school, and he stopped napping last year in Kindergarten. He was beyond tired, and I was cranky because I hadn’t slept well the night before. We were both on the edge, but she didn’t know that.

And to that, and to her, I say fuck you. You don’t know me. You don’t know the crap I do and the things I have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice to be a good mom. And I’m not a teenager anymore, so don’t give me that “Teen Mom bullshit Look” anymore. I’ll be 26 in three months. I’ve been a mom for nearly seven years. So shut the hell up and remember what it was like to have a tired and antsy kid at a department store. And if my memory serves me correct, you had like three kids. So you have no room to judge at all. All that matters is that Nicky is loved and clothed and fed and warm and has the things he needs in his life to be well-adjusted and to safely and easily assimilate into society. Blahhhh.

Other than that, we had a great day. We had a deep conversation as to why he needs to behave when we are in public, and then we had pizza with my parents (whom, by the way, we live with, thanks to my shitty paying job and the craptastic economy) and spent the rest of the evening watching old episodes of Benny Hill and The Three Stooges. It was a great day indeed.

Oh, and save that spare change for the parking meter. We’re going out on the second date soon 😛

XOXO