I am having what I like to tell my staff is a tea break… during which I sit and stare glassy-eyed at my system and look as though I am knee-deep in concentration when in fact, I am doing no work at all. Nor have I done all day.
I have exhibited a willful lack of responsibility today. The insidious nature of laziness and lethargy has crept in and the simple fact is... I don’t WANT to do this anymore.
Chicken Parts:
I was at Barcelos this weekend (yes, Funmi, the burger is still bangin’). A woman who ordered about 5 bags of chicken began to unwrap each one to check and see if it was the part she specified. (Wing/Breast only).
To her utter dismay, as she cleared the overpowering weave out of her face (so disarrayed from being swung angrily from side to side as she shook her head woefully), she discovered that most of the chicken was thigh/leg parts.
With her eyes full of what I can only call an unappealing mixture of disgust and despair, she looked at her friend (who was anxiously rewrapping the chicken as though the mere sight of all those thighs was offensive) and said in her very affected British accent, “I haaaaaaaaaaaaaate chicken legs and thigh. This has RUINED my day!”
As I struggled to keep a straight face and avoid pointing, doubling over in laughter and slapping my knee, I thought to myself, ‘someone keep the neckbone away from this woman before it unravels her entire existence.’ Chick PLEASE, get you a day job and an air bubble and save the rest of us from catching the vacuous-ness.
The real post:
Written sometime in 2006? Or was it 2007? <
Hey Peanut
“Hey Peanut! How’s life?”
This is usually the way conversations between me and him begin. Peanut. Despite the fact that he’s well over 6 feet and has about 60 lbs on me…pure muscle, he’s still Peanut. He’s got the long limbs of a man and the chubby facial innocence of a little kid. He hasn’t started to grow a beard or mustache yet, but he vigilantly watches for signs. Hope housed in tiny sprouts of hair, renegade and prickly.
He sighs heavily. The sigh of an old man whose seen the world and gets life’s big joke… or the sigh of an overly dramatic kid who’s the butt of that joke at the moment. I can see him rubbing his head, stroking his now close-cut hair forward with a half-smile on his face. Mouth turned up a little tiny bit on the right side, like the after affects of a good long laugh.
“I’m alright” he says. Typical teenage cool. He puts a little bass in there just to make sure I understand that his cheeks are no longer eligible or available for my pinching fingers.
“Really?” I ask, amused. “What’s new?”
“Well...” he begins. I can see him settling back into whatever chair he’s currently perched on, preparing to tell me something good.
“Wait!!” I say… “What’s the question of the day?”
Its this thing we do. We both agreed long ago that some rap lyrics today are entirely too ridiculous for words. So, we make them our question of the day…reveling in our own pension for assholery. And it’s great.
“Can you rock with it? Can you lean with it? Can you rock so damn hard you break your spleen with it?”
We laugh uncontrollably. Despite our many disagreements, this is one thing we’ve got down. Then, one of us has to ask the old standby… it was our question of the day for an entire month one summer…
“Have you ever been to Saint Tropez and seen a brother play a mandolay?” We laugh some more, both of us thinking... . ‘He really can’t be serious about that one.’
Then we talk about everything. Basketball, how hard (or easy) it is to be our Mom, working and coming home and then cooking.
“Shoot, ya’ll lucky she cooked for you as long as she did. I don’t know how she did it. Now that I’m out in the real world, I really understand. She’s amazing!! I develop severe narcolepsy at about 6:00pm everyday. Mom’s the bomb!” my diatribe begins.
“Sometimes, she gets on my nerves” he always disagrees with me there.
He skips around his involvement with the females, I guess he understands that I changed his diapers, and I will beat them off with a broom stick if I have to.
More than anything we laugh. Sometimes it takes everything I’ve got in me not to get all misty-eyed when I think about how tiny and precious he used to be as a baby. How he liked me best, and we would laugh together at ages 8 and 1 respectively. How me and my mom used to swing him between our arms in the park and how he would get a running start and lift his feet off the ground and enjoy the ride.
I could listen to him laugh all day. Even now. Even though we don’t see each other face to face as much as we used to (which is wholly my fault, as he doesn’t drive yet) I know by heart where his dimples show up when he’s laughing, or where his brow furrows when he’s upset and tries not to show it.
I look at him and wish I could protect him from the ills of the world; that rude awakening that slapped me in the face and stole my breath without me ever seeing it coming. Isn’t that what it means to be a big sister? But I know in doing this, he might grow to resent me when he realizes he hasn’t done something just because I told him not to. I know that people must be injured to enjoy other times more. So, against my better sense I urge him on.
“Just do it!” I say. “It’s all about the experience.” Even if experience means terrible pain, exile, ridicule for now. It’s a rite of passage. Sometimes experience will mean love, power, acceptance and joy.
The bottom line I guess is that I love Peanut. Sarcastic and stand-offish though he may be sometimes, he’s quite capable of taking over the world. I wish he saw what I see.
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