Me as a Trash Panda

Aside from Dolly, my black baby panther that is secretly me reincarnated come back to love me in the most unconditional way and make me emotionally codependent on a 7 pound feline, there's no other animal that gets me more than a raccoon. And that is the last time I will call them that, because we all know they are actually just trash pandas.

Me when skinny people say they don’t diet or exercise



Me trying to decide if I should get a side of cheese dip at Willys


Me the day after I get my highlights and they haven’t leveled out yet


What I wake up to at 6:30 on Saturday mornings from a 4 year old


My husband when I am about to say something like “Snitches get stitches” to the kids to teach them a life lesson about tattle telling


Me when I’ve said something a little too honest to my friend about how her outfit looks and now I feel badly

Me when I’m trying to be culturally sensitive about a topic I know nothing about


Me when at that point I just can’t even anymore


The result of me saying “I’m going to wing it”

Me when I’m left in charge of more than 3 children at 1 time

Me when the doorbell rings and it’s the Thai delivery

Me when I check my bank account balance after I’ve paid all the bills

Me having to be nice to people I don’t like

Me when someone tries to touch my face or hair

Me in every picture where I am forced to smile

Me when I think I've picked up the last toy and come around the corner to see the den has been made a disaster again

Literally just me. All the time.

36 Airport Thoughts

1. How are this many people traveling on a Thursday.

2. I'm definitely going to miss my flight

3. Where does this line even start OH MY GOSH NO.

4. This airport line is my personal prison

5. Yessss the bomb dog is walking over here

6. That is the cutest effing dog I've ever seen

7. If they didn't want me to pet him they should have put a sign on him or something 

8. Apparently there's a huge sign on him saying Do Not Pet

9. Ok but how else would I let him know how proud I am of him?

10. Whatever. That bomb dog loves me.

11. Holy cow this line just warp sped up

12. Of course my phone is crashing right now

13. "Hi sorry! My boarding pass is loading. Haha... ‎sorry... just a sec... you guys go in front of me...

14. Oh my gosh I need a pedicure

15. I wonder if the people in this line are as aware of my disaster pedicure as I am

16. Why is that girl bringing a full sized bedroom pillow?

17. Enjoy putting that on the xray belt, and then putting your face on it.‎

18. Like, that's 1 of her 2 carry ons. What even.

19. Did I feed dolly? 

20. Whatever she's a survivor.

21. I'm starving

22. I need coffee

23. **looks at coffee line** I do not need coffee that badly

24. I mean I get that you want to be comfortable on the plane, but you are still in public. You're legit wearing pajamas.

25. Why is that woman so dressed up? You're about to be on a plane, the can't be comfortable.

‎26. I have so much work to do on this plane

27. I can't wait to be insanely productive on this plane

28. If I have to gate check my bag I'm going to throw a bitch fit.

29. If people wouldn't shove their full sized pillows in the overhead compartment maybe my bag would fit.

30. I mean, you can't just stay seated in the aisle seat and force me to crawl over you to get to my window seat. That's not a thing.‎

31. Oh my gosh that person is already asleep haha

32. It's 10 am how are you asleep?

33. I miss Sky Mall Magazine

34. I feel like flight attendants have to get therapy for how much they hate the seat belt spiel.

35. ‎Ok, take off. As soon as the bell dings I'm going to bust out this laptop and get to work.

36. **takes nap the entire flight**‎

HGTV

HGTV Shows

For the past forever we have been without real actual rich people cable and have been using Sling which is slang for “I’ll take a random assortment of channels for $20/month”. One such channel is HGTV. I’m convinced that everyone watches this channel as much as we do. All the time. There are a total of 4 shows on this channel, all of which are equally as absurd and we cannot take our eyes off them.

Flip or Flop

You guys thought I was going to start with Fixer Upper, didn’t you. Well I’m not. I’m starting with Flip or Flop because it’s the most obnoxious and it’s on for the next 3 hours. It is about a couple named Tarek and Christina. 

Tarek, despite his name, is not a rich oil magnate from Yemen but is a lily white guy who is allergic to thinking about a home purchase for longer than 12 seconds. Christina is an attractive tall blonde woman who cannot keep her lisp at bay. She says more words containing the letter “S” than any other human, and every time it’s a drop in the 30 minute Chinese water torture bucket that is hearing her say “housth” and “sthunroom” and “sthtunning”.

This couple is the definition of “Every pot has a lid”. They are sthoul matesth. Things they have bonded over:

   1. Thinking massive cracks running throughout the foundation and flooring have nothing to do with a structural issue with the home.

2.  Assessing that a master bathroom gut and reno will cost $6,000.

3. Pumping $100k into a home, adding no square footage, and banking on a dollar for dollar pay back on said reno.

And last but not least, screaming “WHAT?!?!” in stereo every time one of the above 3 things translates into a problem.

I have watched them successfully sell 1 home, over the dozen episodes I’ve seen. That means that they currently own 11 flops. WHAT?!?!

Fixer Upper

OK duh I couldn’t wait to do this. Really annoyingly, Buzzfeed has beaten me to a review of this show, which makes me feel robbed. This show is #everythinggoals. Andy have watched them shabby chic and shiplap people’s faces off for so many hours that we have started to resent them and just make up flaws they have. We spent 12 minutes the other night rewinding the scene where Joanna does a cartwheel because Andy was convinced she either had a tramp stamp or lower back hair. She had neither. Because she’s flawless.

All I want is to be Joanna Gains. Her hair has an absurd amount of volume in it for being in a ponytail on demo day. She has had 4 photoshopped children and you still couldn’t pay me to be in a swimsuit next to her. She always knows when to wear her rainboots and it doesn’t even look like they make her the least bit sweaty like they do to me. She has access to a printer that can print 1:1 scale photos of homes on wheels. Bump Victoria’s Secret models, she’s the one setting impossible standards.

Just. Hair Volume for dayz.

House Hunters International

This show has absolutely zero consistency. One episode the realtor was actually an emu you guys. Every time they showed her face I almost screamed and kept saying “why are they using an emu to sell them a beach home?!?!”

 The couples on this show have no business living in the same home, and the tagline is always like “She wants a fixer upper detached home on the beach where they can do a full scale reno themselves. He wants a move-in ready condo nowhere near a beach and he doesn’t even own a hammer. Can this emu find something that will make them both happy for less than $12?” Hint: nope.

Property Brothers

My favorite part of watching this show is seeing how long I can go without making a joke about how the two brothers definitely make out. And if they would just admit it, can you imagine how much fun you could have with word play titles for this show? “Invest and Incest”. There, that took me like a second. But ok, “They are just brothers”.

These two also subscribe to the notion that you can put 6 figures of granite into a home and the renovation pays for itself. They also only renovate like 2 rooms. So the rest of the house is always still a complete and utter dump. But they pack a 1-2 punch on realtor/contractor and I legitimately never have any idea which one does witch. I’m convinced this is a fixer upper themed freaky Friday and there’s just 1 person to play both roles. The requirement to have your home done by them is know nothing about renovating a home, be the kind of person that requests 2 dishwashers 3 days before the reno is complete, and be totally fine with the brothers decorating choices involving white leather upholstery. Because duh.

Family Reunions

My family has 2 family reunions every year. One is Christmas themed and is taking place in a few days (missing it) and one takes place in the summer in Kite, Georgia. That summertime one hits the nail on the head with every, single, white-family-from-the-south family reunion stereotype.

Competition

I wish we were the cool family that had “organized sports” with t-shirts at our family reunions, and that would be our healthy outlet for the bitter sibling rivalries that have gone on for the better part of 6 decades. We have nothing of the sort. So instead we have our own decathlon-esque style of being competitive.

  

Round 1: All the moms sit around and compete-brag on their kids. “Oh your son got a full scholarship to college? My daughter did too AND she’s going to be joining the swim team”. The instrumentals for the song “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” plays subtlety in the background during this round.

Round 2: The displays of talent. Naturally every child is a snowflake in my family, and super special. This must be paraded around. Musical performances were always a must, and the cousins would bring their instruments to play – we had flutes, I played the piano, my cousin brought his bassoon one year. A bassoon. Like some weird twist between the von Trapp family and the movie Deliverance.

Round 3: “Games”. For some reason there is always a ping pong table and a pool table at these events. Even as children, these games got fiery. One time when we were playing pool my cousin must have done something really awful, I don’t recall, but I do know that the only legitimate move for me was to hit him upside the head with my pool stick. And to this day I stand by that move.

The Setting

The only proper way to have a family reunion is to A. Have it in a town that no one in the entire state has ever heard of and B. Have it when it is eleventy banillion degrees outside. You know how you get to Kite, Georgia? You go to Swainsboro, and you look at which direction from Swainsboro looks like it has the highest amount of nothing happening, and head in that direction for 30 minutes.

Also please act like the house has air conditioning. Instead, there are just several industrial sized box fans scattered about the lawn for people to catch a breeze. How we managed to procure a dozen 4-foot tall box fans but we couldn’t just maybe get a window AC unit is beside the point. If you need me at these events, I will be standing within 2 millimeters of the front of one of these fans.

There is also a plastic baby pool that has been inexplicably filled up and the kids can just stew in the lukewarm cess pool that is a forgotten baby pool in Kite, Georgia. One year when I was 12 I had brought my swimsuit for this exact purpose in hopes it could cure the pain that is a South Georgia summer. A child at this event (unknown who he is. Are we related? WHO ARE YOU!?) actually serenaded me with the song “My Girl” when he saw me in my swimsuit.

The Food

If anything is going to happen at a family reunion it’s that everyone is going to play real fast and real loose with the word “salad”. The buffet table is just a smorgasbord of all the different ways you can combine mayonnaise with other condiments, add a starch, and call it a day. Rules of the salads are as follows:

1  1.      You must use mayonnaise
    2.      You may not use an actual vegetable

    3.      Russian-roulette style, one of the salads needs to have been left out of refrigeration too long. You will not know which it is. You will get food poisoning from this salad.

And everyone knows that the table is not complete without 4 bags of Sunbeam Yeast Rolls, just sitting in the bag, and everyone reaches their hands in and rips off 3-4 squares of bread to sop up the “salad” with. Hearty.

Men vs Women

It’s basically a widely known fact that there is a perpetual battle going on for which gender is more difficult to deal with. Well, I’m here to tell you that the battle is over. Men and Women are both the absolute worst.

Men Can’t Find Anything

You know that scene in Star Wars when Obi Wan uses his Jedi powers and says “These are not the droids you are looking for”? Turns out that whole scene was completely worthless because he was saying it to a group of men. There was already a zero percent chance they were going to find the droids either way, because men are legitimately incapable of locating anything. 

You might be like “Yea but the droids were, like, right in front of them”. That is inconsequential when it comes to a man locating an object. In fact, the more right-in-front-of-them an object is, the less likely they are to find it. Obi Wan’s move was about as Jedi as when I walk into Target and waive my hands in front of the automatic doors and pretend I did that with my mind.

Women Can’t Fill Anything

I know that I am not the only woman who can say that I will always be on the last drop of gasoline and the last percent of a cell phone battery. At all times. My gas light coming on in my car functions exclusively to tell me that I have 33 more miles that I can drive without thinking about gas. You know what I don’t have? 34 miles. You know how I know that? The hard way. Twice. 

Doesn’t stop me. This doesn’t happen to men. Men are like “I have a quarter tank, better fill up”. That concept is lost on me. Getting gas is such an absurd grind. I keep making my boyfriend switch cars with me for no reason every few days because I know he’ll have whatever car he’s driving filled up. Problem solved.

The level to which I’m interested in charging my phone is the exact amount it is charged: 2%. I am so sorry that I don’t want to be tethered to the wall like a leashed pit bull at a mobile home park, with a 2 foot radius that I can move about while my phone takes a decade to install the trillionth iphone update. The only outlet in our den is directly in front of the gate-to-hell heat vent. So I have to either sit over there next to the heat vent and actually smell my own skin burning, or I have to leave my phone there and go without it for 30 minutes like a Neanderthal. Both options suck. So my phone is never charged beyond 11%. Deal with it.

Men Don’t Get Anything and Women are Vaults

Unfortunately women have a higher mental complexity than a houseplant. A tick more multidimensional. This therefore exceeds the natural ability of a man to even slightly comprehend what is happening. Ever. I would argue that at minimum once a day a guy has absolutely no idea what is going on. As if 26 pages in a book about his life all got stuck together and when he turned the page he’s like “Wait a minute, we’re in Kansas now? Who is this character? It’s Christmas?!” Every. Day.

This pairs really well with the woman’s irrational need to be in a relationship with a mind reader. And everything to a woman can be blown to an infinite proportion at a whim. “Yellow flowers? You’re giving me yellow flowers? I thought I made myself clear that I feel personally victimized by yellow flowers when I told you ‘yellow flowers are tacky’ twelve years ago. It’s as if you’ve COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that my boyfriend in 4^th grade gave Holly Finks a yellow flower on Valentine’s Day and I cried about it. Do you even know me?!?!” That basically is something I’ve said to the letter with the specifics change to protect the innocent.

How does this even work? I’ve had MULTIPLE conversations with my best friend Allison about how if I could just learn to like women my life would be so much easier. But would it? Because if I had to be in a relationship with someone like me we would both be showcased on an I.D. channel special about how two women simultaneously plotted each other’s death and would have flawlessly gotten away with it. And how about men. How do 2 men have a relationship without starving to death both trying to find the milk INSIDE THE FRIDGE WHERE THE MILK LITERALLY ALWAYS HAS BEEN. Every single match up iteration is a full blown catastrophe- but hey, we’re all in this together (High School Musical 10 year reunion BTW!!!!!!)

Apparently We Were All Poor

As a child there were just certain things you didn’t question. Your parents would tell you the situation and you would be like “Who am I to assess the validity of that statement? I’m a child with apparently incredible vocabulary in this instance”. Well now that we are not children I am here to tell you one thing – apparently we were all poor. And blithely unaware of this fact.

Toys

Do you know how much a Barbie is these days? Five doll-hairs. Do you know how much a bike is? Like 60 bucks if you get the cool beads that come on the spokes and the basket. I was under the impression that these items were made entirely out of conflict diamonds. My sister got my dad’s old road bike and he spray painted it sparkle purple to make it girly. 

I got my mom’s old Ken doll who definitely had real human hair I’m pretty sure. What was happening here? Also thank God my dad was MacGyver because the only kite I ever flew was made out of sticks and wrapping paper. And worked like a charm.

School Projects

Every school project was the same. First of all, you were going to need a trifold board. Because how in the actual world could you possibly present something in any other format. Am I the only one who had to re-use these things? 

I always felt like the integrity of my “Which Denture Adhesive is the Strongest” was compromised because not only did I have to display this on a used trifold it was, naturally, on a used trifold that my dad had made. It had hinges. It was covered in layer upon layer of previous projects, and it was a hand-me-down from my sister who was 7 years older than I was. If that’s not going green, I don’t know what is.

Printing

The only way you could possibly make your trifold even come close to winning an award was to use Word Art. The risk here for me was that colored ink was harvested from the tears of the dodo bird, apparently, and we can’t be just willy-nilly printing our faces off. 

Was I allowed to print my word art titles? Sure. In black and white. Also, good luck with your typo. That’s not a reprint, that’s a job for white out.

That’s the Same thing….

When I was growing up, Adidas all stars were the coolest. I wanted a pair sooooo badly, but they were way too expensive at a WHOPPING $30 a pair. Especially for shoes that now, quite frankly, look like something a podiatrist would prescribe for plantar fasciitis. You know who made the “same thing”? Payless. Did they? Or did theirs have 4 stripes instead of 3. At least let’s just agree that it’s not the same thing. 

You know what also isn’t a pair of JNCO jeans? Lee pipes.

At the end of it all you know what actually happened? No, we weren’t poor. We were kids, and kids are money sponges. And our parents were not interested in spending $80 on a pair of jeans to make us look like Gumby, or buying our stupid “projects” a $7 piece of cardboard every time. I one time made a tri fold about why I should be allowed to be called “Liza” instead of “Ainsley”. The Wild Thornberries was one of my explanations. That’s stupid. I don’t blame my parents at all.

Lunch Hour

The mall near where I work can be summed up as the answer to this question: “Where can I go when I need an outfit, I have $12, and I don’t even want to spend all of that”. Naturally I hate it, and yet when given a slow day at the office I find myself darkening its doors. Today was one such day. And it continued to deliver on being legitimately the weirdest.

As I pulled into the parking lot I found it harder than usual to find a spot. This isn’t so much due to the fact that it’s Christmas time, but more so due to the fact that school busses were taking up the spots.

 I’m sorry, is there a field trip to the mall happening today? Is that real life? Did some kid have to go home and get his mom to sign a permission slip and give him $5 for his sack lunch so he could go on a field trip to JC Penny? What school is this? The only justification I could see behind this is taking all the slackers on a trip and ghost-of-Christmas-futuring them about where they are headed career-wise if they don’t shape up.

As I’m walking through the mall I walk PAST a disgracefully embarrassing shoe store called Cathy Jean. What’s your target demographic when you’re naming a store after someone’s aunt? Aunts. That’s who. 

To be clear, I’m not in this store, and yet a lady FLAGS me down and asks me to help her pick a shoe out. Her exact words were “Can you help me? I’m trying to go for an Eva Longoria look and don’t know what shoe to pick”. The only answer I could muster is “I don’t personally know Ms. Longoria but I’d venture to guess that the 70% off blow out sale at Cathy Jean isn’t a target rich environment for her shoe collection. But that beige kitten heel will do.” How is that a real thing that happened.

I then make my way to Sephora because I’m “technically” out of foundation but it’s also “technically” my birthday month and I want my free birthday gift. The line is equivalent to being at the airport the day before Thanksgiving and not having sky priority or TSA pre check like some unknown hobo. 

When I finally get to the front the cashier is like “Is this all you’re buying?!?!” as if to say that I’m crazy for standing in such a line for this small purchase. Excuse me to the moon and back that the Lord and I share a birthday month. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of it. And quite frankly I enjoy exercising quite possibly the only self-control I possess and not buying all the do-dads that your store places like bait in the line to distract me. You know where I’m about to not exercise said self-control? Great Wraps in the food court when they ask me if I want to add curly fries.

The food court is the loneliest place on earth. Literally everyone is sitting at a table by themselves eating Chinese food or a great wrap that she said no cheese on and she’s obviously going to the gym later and not eating dinner tonight so it’s no big deal if she gets fries. You know who very much does not belong in the food court, 9 days before Christmas, barreling though like she’s been set on fire? A blind lady. And yet there she is. Walking at such an uncomfortable pace that I start to question if maybe she’s actually a speed walker and she just likes pushing a walking stick in front of her. I am so insanely uncomfortable with what she’s doing and also with how much of a Nostradamus I am because lo and behold she jackknifes an empty chair. 

Of course you did. I only wish you t-boned the sample lady so I could watch all the samples cartoonishly fly into the air. And that’s my cue to head back to work.