Liar, Liar, Pants May or May Not be on Fire

            A new study just came out that says people who text slowly are more likely to be liars.  Whaat?  How can they be onto me, already?  I just started texting with my new Smart Phone last week!  You can read about this dreadful, I mean this wonderful surprise birthday gift here:

            Researchers (and let me just derail for a moment to say these are, shall we say, an interesting group of people, themselves) have found that when people lie in texts, they take longer to respond, make more edits, and write shorter responses than usual. 

            Folks, if that isn’t a description of me, trying to text, I don’t know what is.  Ergo I am the biggest liar out there.  You can see the article on this breakthrough announcement at Meridian, the very online magazine where I write a weekly column here.  And yet, despite my being the most suspiciously deceptive individual with a cell phone, they still permit me to write for them.

            Apparently we humans are lousy at detecting untruths. We can only spot lies about half of the time, and we’re even less accurate when someone lies digitally, because we can’t see or hear them.  And those tell-tale pauses, the editing… it all points to Pinocchio, I tell you.

            But I want to go one further.  I think St. Bob, when he swipes the word manana, trying to sound as if he speaks Spanish, and it comes out banana, well—we all know this could point to his having psychotic, perhaps even serial killer, tendencies.  The very screen he’s working on has him pegged—he’s bananas!  

And when he writes Joni, and it comes out Homi, well, you can’t get more racist than that.  Sometimes it comes out Hobo, a disparaging and not politically correct label that makes us all shake our heads and wonder what is wrong with that man.

            There’s another clue, here.  When I text, the punctuation I so dearly love, goes out the window.  Gone.  Desapareció  (See?  I actually do speak Spanish).  It’s like the time I put an apostrophe in the wrong place, and my daughter stared at me and said, “This is the first sign that you need to go into assisted living.”  Well, now that I’m texting without any punctuation at all, it has to be a cry for help that I need to be put down.  Or at least sent on a cruise.  Something to ease the pain.

Hurry and text your friends to subscribe to this blog.  But for heaven’s sake, don’t pause when you do it, or they’ll never believe you.

My Reverse Bucket List

I have a Reverse Bucket List. This means I have done several things I’d like to take back. Oh, sure, they seemed exciting at the time, but they were wildly oversold and completely disappointing if not downright hazardous.

 Lest you charge, willy-nilly, into every idea that pops into your head, I shall share 10 of my mistakes with you:

1. Get your child a chemistry set.

This seemed the very picture of conscientious parenting. What kid wouldn’t be a brainy wonder if you got him a chemistry set? I’ll tell you who. The kid who uses it to splatter the ceiling with purple chemicals, ignite fumes that engulf the kitchen, create explosions that rattle the windows, and scare the living daylights out of all the neighbors.

2. Visit Hershey, Pennsylvania, the chocolate capitol of the world. Unless you decide to roll your windows down just as you arrive, so as to inhale the heavenly fragrance of this elixir of the gods, and then realize that to make milk chocolate, you’ve got to have cows, and, well, then you roll the windows back up again.

3. Grow your hair long enough to sit on it. Possibly the most overrated experience in the world, sitting on one’s hair pulls it and hurts. Years of effort towards this goal are now seen as a stupid investment in a ridiculous outcome. Bring on the scissors.

4. Go hang gliding. Everything about this experience is exciting right up until the crash landing, which scrapes up your legs, pulls off your gloves and rings, and leaves you bloody and muddy in a thistle bush.

5. Scuba dive in Mexico.  Except that they have interesting laws in Mexico, about where the sewage ends up.

6. Be a foreign correspondent. Oh, the excitement, the glamor! I spent a summer in college studying at the BBC in London, with the idea that only James Bond would have more stamps on his passport than I did. And then I met actual foreign correspondents who were all alcoholics with broken marriages. All of them.

7. Own a boat. And then discover why people say the second-happiest day of their life was buying a boat, but the happiest day was selling it.

8. See the reindeer herds above the Arctic Circle. Of course, you have to make sure the tiny airplane has enough gasoline, so you don’t’ have to crash land up there.

9. Go on a survival camp in Moab, Utah. And hope you don’t have the terrible timing to be there during a rare flash flood, trapping the entire group in a cave for the night.

10. Have natural childbirth. But after 36 hours with Pitocin and a posterior-turned baby, I think I’d like to turn the clock back and do that one just a tad differently. If only this child could grow up and invent a time machine! Hey, maybe if I buy him a chemistry set…

Some things are good to put on your bucket list—reading a Joni Hilton book, for one.  Okay, for twenty.  Get started now, by visiting Createspace.com or Amazon.com.  I promise the worst that can happen is that you might laugh until your sides hurt.

Smarty Pants Phone

It’s not my birthday, yet, but St. Bob couldn’t wait to give me an early gift—a Smart Phone. For days, he’s been trying to throw me off by saying he couldn’t wait for a box to arrive containing some doo-da for his own phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Finally, the Fed Ex truck pulls up, and you’d have thought this was a dream toy for a ten-year-old. And you’d be right.

Bob tears open my present, and immediately wants to teach me how to use it. Mind you, it’s almost 10 pm and my eyes are turning into little x’s just as he is revving up with excitement. I know my old phone is ready for archeologists to assign it an era and stick it in a museum, but the rubbery keys were easy to press.

“As long as it doesn’t have buttons on the sides,” I say, a design flaw I can’t believe trained engineers continue to make.

“All cell phones have buttons on the side,” he reminds me.

I sigh. “Okay, then as long as I can press the keys with my fingernails.” Oops. You have to use the tips of your fingers. This doesn’t work for women with fake nails. When I use my finger pad, I end up hitting four wrong keys at the same time.

“I can just use a stylus,” I say. Nope. It has to be heat-activated. (What do people do in cold climates during the winter, when their fingers are cold?) No matter. I am told I can use a knuckle. Oh, boy, that will speed things up.

Bob can’t wait to bring me up to speed, and get me to put down my tin can and string. We spend an hour loading phone numbers, ring tones, and letting me practice making and receiving calls, and trying (unsuccessfully) to type text messages.

“It’s white,” I say. “And yours is white. How will we tell them apart?”

(Laughter.) (No explanation.) Later I am shown that his phone is twice the size of mine.

I have another good question. “So is this an i-phone?”

(Laughter.) “It’s an Apple!”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“That’s all Apple makes!”

I sigh. “No, it isn’t—they make computers, too.”

“But iphones are the only phones Apple makes,” Bob says.

“How am I supposed to know this?”

“Because every dang person in the universe knows it!” He sounds like the driving instructors I had in my teens.

“Every person? I doubt that,” I say.

“Name one person,” Bob argues, “who doesn’t know that Apple only makes iphones.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thurzel Brewer.”

“Fine,” he says, “I’ll call her up and bet you anything she knows.”

“You do that,” I say. “And if she answers, I’ll believe anything you tell me.” Bob has forgotten that Thurzel is dead, thus if she answers her phone AND knows this stupid information about Apple, he can win the argument. Thurzel was a darling elderly woman in our church, by the way, and I still miss her. I even named one of my cats after her.

We drift off to sleep, but Bob keeps waking up, so excited about all the features on this new toy. I wake up worried that I’ll miss every text message and call for the next month.

This morning we hook it up to the (previously unknown) Bluetooth system in my car, and go buy it a protective cover which, if the brainiac engineers would make it out of unbreakable material in the first place, would be unnecessary. We also buy it a protective cover for the glass (GLASS!) face. If this is a smart phone, what is a dumb one made of— Egg shells?  Potato chips? I’m telling you, Thurzel got out just in time.  

Whether you have a Smart Phone or a Below Average Phone, you can be smart enough to subscribe to my blogs-- and see what St. Bob is up to, next!             

Setting Goals for the New School Year

            Well, it’s that time of year again.  School is starting up, despite everyone I know wishing they’d wait until after Labor Day.  Apparently parents and kids have no vote in such matters that impact their lives and schedules. 

            And so we dutifully buy backpacks, notebooks, binders, pens, and send our kids off in the wee morning hours (another no-vote) to attend a school whose schedule we did not endorse and whose curriculum we question.

            Incidentally, anytime you have a question you can’t answer, or you’re confused about why something is happening, the answer is always the same: Money.   

              But I digress.

            Oh, well.  At least we can be good parents and urge our children to set goals for the new academic year.  Goals are good, right?

 Let me share with you some of my kids’ goals over the years, unshared with me at the time, but held dearly in their hearts.

            The first goal is one I actually heard about on the last day of school one year, when a son of mine came home and announced he had reached the ONE GOAL he had set for the year. 

            I was thrilled. “What was it?” I asked.

            “To wear shorts every single day.”  I kid you not.  Shorts.  Even through the winter.  This took bravery and cunning, to be sure.  And many an insistence to a worried mother that “I’m not cold.”  And, sure enough, he didn’t get sick.  Oh, if only this were Daredevil School—my kid could have been Valedictorian.  Or at least get an A-plus in Shorts-Wearing 101.  Our family is nothing, if not focused upon the things that matter most.

             The next goal I learned about at the Awards Ceremony held just before the end of the year.  I was notified that another son would be receiving a certificate of merit, and I wouldn’t want to miss it.  Oh, boy, what to wear?  Shorts?  Nope—something dressy, something appropriate for the mother of the Governor’s Award Winner or the Honor Society Scholarship Recipient, or the Your Kid Is Amazing Commendation.  I waited and waited as illustrious awards were handed out for stupendous achievements in science, mathematics, drama, music.  Oh boy, they were saving the best for last!  My kid was going to win the Nobel Prize in Everything.  Finally his name was announced and he marched up on stage to receive his award for perfect attendance.  Yes, that’s right, never missed a day the whole year.  It was a moment of parental pride, I can tell you.

            And the last goal was one I learned of two years later, at a party where a son and one of his high school buddies were regaling us with tales of their senior year. Suddenly the buddy produced a photo of my son holding up a school handbook and pointing at it.  Hmm. 

            “I can’t believe he got the handbook re-written,” the friend said, clearly impressed.  “He said he was going to get more tardies than anyone in the history of the school, and he did it!”

             Well, words fail me and you both, don’t they?  Turns out my kid, who graduated early and went on to a local junior college, kept coming back to Auto Shop so he could work on his Mustang, and by strolling in late every day, finally accrued enough tardies to cause the administration to forbid any early graduate from waltzing back into Auto Shop as if he owned the place.  Of course, they worded it differently, but that was the gist. 

            “That’s so cool that you made history,” the buddy laughed, clearly missing the difference between famous and infamous.

Let’s take another look at these goals—shorts, attendance, and tardies.  Am I the only one who realizes they spell SAT?  Yep, believe me, I am the only one.

Here's a goal for you: Watch one of my Your YouTube Mom videos every week, and buy one of my books.  You'll have 16 or so by Christmas, and your shopping will be done!