Puzzle Piece #1

I’m at home for a week.  How to explain home in one sentence?  For at least seven years, my parents’ cd player has turned itself on every single day at 3:30 pm, regaling the listener with anything from opera to LeAnn Rimes. 

On the practical use of eggs

The Jewel by my house* has televisions in every single manned line, so customers can be entertained while waiting.   The migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting is bad enough, as is choosing between the robotic self check-out and the line with an actual person (questionable at times) who gets paid for the work, even though the company’s trying to save more money with the robots (good thing for the real people that the self check-out malfunctions approximately 92% of the time).  Long-windedness aside, I’m watching the television as a perky lady tells me how to make an “eggshell planter.”  Why?  Because it’s creative!  And easy!  You just crack open an egg (carefully, because you only want to crack off the top), empty out the yolk, fill the hollowed shell with a bit of soil and grass seed, draw a face on the egg shell and Ta Da! You have a little punky green hair-do on your egg man!  Now, where’s the walrus?  The Ta Da! is what sent me to the robot line…I just couldn’t take it.  Perky is the devil.

But on to another fabulous use for eggs–teaching fifth graders the importance of being heterosexual and not having sex until married!  What an awesomely weird idea!  Maybe it’s because in 1990, we were all secretly watching 90210 when our parents weren’t looking.  The teachers heard us talking about Brenda’s false alarm with Dylan, and behold! an idea was born!  Hard-boiled egg-babies! (after all, the egg-man was once a wee pup).  So, the boys and girls paired up (my nerdy self was paired with the very popular teacher’s son, who,  even at the age of ten looked a little like Brandon Walsh and a lot like Rick Astley), drew faces on their eggs, and prepared to take care of them for a week without dropping them or allowing them to be hit by those red bouncy-balls on the playground (Wall Ball was exceptionally popular between the years 1988 and 1991).  Some kids’ mothers even sewed little diapers and decorated baskets for the eggs.  I gave mine a blanket of scrap fabric so it wouldn’t be cold.  But guess what Mrs. H’s son did the first night it was his turn to take care of little eggy-egg?  He dropped him.  Bad father.  Bad.  But, since he was the teacher’s son, he was allowed to make a new one and pretend the replacement baby looked exactly the same as the dead baby.  That’s politics, for ya.   It was a pointless exercise–even if I had been thinking about sex instead of, say, how I was going to make it through an entire day without picked on too terribly, I definitely wouldn’t have fantasized about doing “it” with Brandon Astley.  He was the spawn of a woman who told the entire class it was illegal to make fun of the president (Republican wench) and who referred to my orthotics as “orthodontics”.  We were also required to complete a series of “critical thinking folders”–one question I still remember is “if you could create your own 24-hour line-up of television shows, what would it consist of?”  Critical wha–How does talking about all the television you like fit into the category of critical thinking?  Especially when popular television includes 90210 and America’s Funniest Home Videos? 

And my mother wonders how I grew up to be so cynical.  Egg-babies, ma.  Egg-babies.  They grow up to be grass-haired egg-men who make me want to cry in a way so horrible.  It’s a sad, mad world.  Kill the egg-babies.

**By house, I mean crappy studio apartment whose window overlooks the alley and at which homeless people sometimes yell inanities about werewolves because I didn’t put anything good in the trash.