m “ Daddy, I want Mommy.”
M: “Here I am.”
m: “ I want Daddy.”
Me: “Here I am.”
m: “I want Grandpa.”
Me: “ What a coincidence, he happens to be here now.”
m: “I want grandma.”
Me: “She’s here too.”
m: “I want whomever is not here so I can have something to complain about.”
Me: “Jesus fucking Christ!”
M: “I want Jesus.”
This basically sums up what life is like with two 2 1/2 year old girls. They always want the parent who’s not there. They look for any excuse to scream or piss you off and they sleep about 10 minutes at night before waking up and screaming about the boogie man/ it’s too cold/ I want some water/is Bingo the name of the man or his dog?
"m" is becoming more and more of an artist in spite of me trying to prevent it. Perhaps it’s just a phase. She keeps taking her toys and arranging them into these instillation pieces. You’ll come in the room and all of her dolls are lined up and facing the window. I asked her what she called it and she said they’re people, watching TV out of the window. Wow! Like living with Cindy Sherman. "a" is the queen of imitation. She can hear a song once and sing it back to you (albeit full of la la and yadda yadda for the parts she doesn’t know). "a" is also going through the Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Phase more than "m". Even if mom is holding another kid, a sack full of groceries and a backpack of bowling balls, “a” wants to be picked up too. She will howl and scream as if her parent’s were Michael Jackson and Joan Crawford.
In short, my kids are cute and annoying.
Okay. It’s been a while for blog-gagging. So let’s do a flash back: Got fired, tried to look for another University job, they all want someone with waaaay more dick sucking skills than I’d ever want to do. Hey! Here’s an idea! I’ll sign up for dick sucking lessons. So I look into college courses (regular ones, I don't think they teach dick sucking, except at Texas A&M) But what do I want to do? What do I like to do?…Okay what do I NOT want to do: let’s see: retail, work for the Universities printing department, suck dicks.
I come from a medical family. Perhaps I should see if there’s a special gene in there and pursue a career in something medical related. I mean surely, working at a hospital may suck but at least you can strap on a red cape every now and then and save a couple of lives. I just want something that I can enjoy that’s NOT art. I’ve had it with trying to make a living as an artist. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to do art but I’m tired of being treated like the lowest person on the business totem pole. Artist are always the most abused, fired and underpaid employees. It’s like all bosses think they can replace the artist with someone off the street and heaven for fucking bid if the artist wants to make enough money to start a family, buy a house and live a life that doesn’t consist of getting drunk, eating Ramen noodles and saving your money to buy used records.
I don’t have 11 years for medial school so I look into some kind of assistant program: Here’s one:Phlebotomy. Sticking needles in peoples asses. That’s one right up my alley (or their alleys). If a customer pisses me off at my job? I’m holding a big ass needle! Get ready for the pain train motherfucker! Woooo! Woooo!
They teach a 1 year course at Kaiser so I call them up and they say: Oh yeah, just get all the stuff done on the application and show up at 8 Am on October blah blah blah and no queing!. The application required a long list of things; including TB test, Hep B vaccines, Measles immunization etc… along with a certificate that says you know CPR. CPR? Call Police Really fast?
I take a one day CPR class complete with 3 kinds of dummies to resuscitate: Annie, Andrew and Andy. A man, a woman and kid. What the hell is wrong with that family? Can they not swim? DO they drink pork milkshakes? We had to learn to do chest compressions on them and mouth to mouth using plastic mouth covers, as if we were giving head to prostitutes. The secret to chest compressions I discovered is that you really have to put your weight into it, otherwise you can’t get to the heart. In most cases, if you do it RIGHT you pop right through the joints of the rib cage and cause some damage. Some people in the class barely made the dummies chest rise when they breathed into it and for all of their weakling chest compressions, they’d have a better job bringing a hamster back to life. I passed the course and got my card. Next I got a gazillion blood test and immunization shots. So many, I can probably drink a glass of unfiltered African water and butt fucking a lab monkey. I get everything done a day before the application deadline. I remember the woman said show up at 8Am and no queuing! I know that there are only 14 people allowed in this class so I say, fuck it: There’s the rules and then there’s what people do. I’m gonna show up at 7:30! I get there the next day and there are 30 people already there! Two girls in the front of the line have lawn chairs and had been there since 4 am! As if they were buying concert tickets! M convinces me to stay and wait in line because you never know. Perhaps some people didn’t get all of their shots or really are trying to buy concert tickets and got confused. 8 Am comes around, and then 9. This female security guard tells the people in front how wrong it was for them to show up early. Oh good, I think, is she going to make them go home? No, just a useless finger wagging. Around 30 people line up behind me. At one point the lawn sprinklers cut on, drenching the people in the front of the line. This made me temporarily happy. Finally the doors open and people start going in…and coming out. Huh? What the? One by one, some people would go in and come back out. Their applications were being rejected! They didn’t have their shots or took the wrong CPR course or really were there for concert tickets. M was right. Closer and closer I got. From 26 people in front on me it got down to 10, then 4! Some people were getting accepted but a lot were coming out including the two wet girls who had been there all night! I had this one Indian guy in front of me. I think I heard him say he may have the wrong CPR card: Whoo hoo! Another person got rejected. They had one more slot to fill, the Indian guy went in….......and got accepted. That was it. No more applications will be accepted until the next year. I was one person away from getting into the class! On my angry walk back, I cursed all gods and the world itself. Not only is life unfucking fair but life has a cruel, cruel sense of humor.
After calming down a week later. We discovered that the same school teaches a radiology class. This one, although allowing a small amount of people, had a more school-like application process, which didn’t allow for cueing up style. But I did have to take some prerequisites: Anatomy, physiology, college level algebra and some other courses as frosting. Kaiser taught their own Anatomy and Physiology class so I signed up for that one. As for the Algebra class. I failed algebra in high school with flaming colors and had to go to summer school. I sighed up for classes at a local College. (Insert bouncy music here) that’s right, I’m an angry 41-year-old man going back to school!
It’s interesting to see what your adult brain can do without the worry about getting laid, your parents divorce or pimples. So far, I’ve done pretty well in both courses. Back in high school I did back flips if I got a 75. Now I get pissed off if I make under a 92.
The classes are polar opposites. The algebra class was filled with 32 students, that talked about nothing but working at the GAP, playing video games and smelling like dirty sneakers and the Anatomy class is mostly older people who are probably already working at the hospital and are tying to get better positions. Of the 32 Algebra class mates they’re about 9 of us left. The rest could not be separated from level 4 of Grand Theft Auto. One particular individual I called Mr. Cake, actually showed up on the first day of class eating a slice of cake! On a plate! Cake I tell you! Where the fuck did he get cake? And why eat it in class? The other drop outs, and I have to say the mot disruptive students were a group of fat Black girls who ate boxes of Wheat Thins, had loud cell phone conversations when the teacher was explaining quadratic equations and if they showed up for class, at all, would come in, get their names on the sign in and then leave, to do what? Why did you sign up for this class? Why are you here? You’re 18 and finally out off the house? More differences: The algebra class is taught by a short handicapped Asian guy who when he gets excited will talk really fast and leave your tiny brain back at the 1+1=2 starting line, the anatomy class is taught by this tall muscularly silver haired bo-hunk professor who, if I were gay…we’ll if I were gay, I wouldn’t be in any of these situations because gay= no kids=no reson to buy house=no reason to take shity art job to get fired from in the first place.
But this is where I am, in school, doing okay in the grades department. In my home life, lots of D's: Depressed a lot, Dealing with screaming 2 1/2 year olds, Doing most of the cooking and cleaning while trying to study and heaven forbid, Do some art to maintain my sanity. M rags on me when ever I do anything that’s not cooking, cleaning, kids and school. It makes me miss having a shitty job. I mean, if I had a job, and I came home and worked on art then they’d be no questioning but being unemployed, it’s like you’re now a shark. If you stand still, you die. An employed person at rest is relaxing, an unemployed person at rest is lazy.
That’s it
E.M
