Neither the High Road nor the Low Road

Sometimes, you read something or you hear something and you get pissed off. If you’re me, that happens fairly frequently. I have a very low tolerance for things I think are stupid or wrong or discriminatory or just plain ass-backwards. Sometimes, in response to these things, you want to write nasty emails, post nasty blog entries, or throw mud in the offending person’s general direction. Sometimes, it feels good to let it all out, to make your voice heard, to one-up the person who has offended you so.

And then there are times for being nice. My mother always used to say to me, "You know, you’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." Well sure you will, but who wants to catch flies anyway? I really prefer to stalk flies with a rolled up magazine and smash them into teeny-tiny little bits while yelling, "Take that, sucka!!" And yes, it does make me feel powerful to kill something 1/100th of my size with overly-zealous force. So much so that sometimes, I do a little victory dance after I kill a fly. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

For about six months when I was 14 years old, my mother decided it was time to get involved in the Unitarian Church. We’re not a family of church-goers generally, and I was suspicious of this decision. She and my father attended the services and my brother and I went to Sunday School. As it turns out, she wanted to enroll me in Sunday School at this particular church because they had a very progressive sex education program. And when I say very progressive I mean that some of the things we talked about and viewed were my first experience with pornography.

Anyway, my mother didn’t last long in this type of organized religion. This is probably a clue as to how our family views religion in general. If my mother couldn’t stomach the Unitarians, she probably will never be able to be a member of any organized religion. She tried to belong, but she was too realistic for the granola-crunchy members, too smart for the new-age members, and too bossy for the church leadership.

Every service ended with members sharing some piece of good news about their families or anything, really. Our last Sunday in church, one of the other mothers of teenagers in the church stood up to expound on the virtues of her children. At great length. Little Tommy had scored a touchdown in football. Little Suzy was on the honor roll again. They had both won awards for creative writing, or art, or music or some shit like that. Everybody politely clapped (and rolled their eyes). Except my mother.

My mother blew a gasket. She marched up to the lectern and grabbed the microphone. She said, "I would just like to tell everyone about my children. They did absolutely nothing spectacular this week. They were completely normal. They haven’t won any awards and haven’t done exceptionally well in school. But I’m still proud of them. Thank you." She dropped the microphone and walked out.

Like I said, that was our last Sunday in church.

But I learned something from her behavior that day. Sometimes, you need to take a few breaths, count to 10 and NOT say the first thing that comes to your mind. Into a microphone. In front of a large audience.

But sometimes you do.

Bottom line . . . sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.

The question is, do I feel nutty today? Well? Do I?

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Nope. I still don’t know. But I'll tell you one thing. I don’t like being classified as a Mommy Blogger. I may be a mommy and a blogger. However, calling me a Mommy Blogger is like making cake using only flour and eggs. And it takes a whole lot more to make a cake. Particularly a Pointlessly Hypertechnical cake. Those are some damn complicated pastries.