Sweet baby Jebus, it’s almost 3 in the morning and I’m wiped out and theoretically supposed to work tomorrow (although not ’till 1) but I appear to be sick with some sort of horrible disease and I’ve been throwing up and so I’m awake.

I’m sure you’re glad I shared.

But anyway, I took some hard-core prescription medicine designed to make me stop hurling and it appears to have fucked me up somewhat. I’m majorly woozy and it’s taking me a zillion tries to type each word correctly.

I just finished reading The Nanny Diaries, which was a fabulous book that I just bought earlier tonight and liked so much that I finished it in one sitting. It’s funny and outrageous and sad at the same time, in part because you can’t believe parents are this crazy but also because you can believe just that. Some people should never be allowed to have children.

For example: yesterday (Saturday) I was at Target, in line behind a girl who couldn’t have been older than I am, and was probably a year or two younger, who was standing in line with her two – yes, TWO – young girls paying for some baby clothes. One girl was a toddler and the other was a baby, sitting screaming in the cart in a diaper, throwing her shoe out of the cart. The mother was wearing cheap dirty Wal-Mart white trash clothes, and had two really tacky tattoos on her ankles, and was standing there SHOUTING at her little girls. And forcefully yanking the littler one back down into the cart seat, over and over. At one point the littler one tossed her shoe and I leaned down and picked it up and put it back in the cart, and that bitch looked straight at me and didn’t even thank me.

The mother was the bitch, not the baby.

Anyway, it made me sad. The girls weren’t behaving badly, they were obviously just tired and wanting some attention, and this girl just yelled at them in front of everyone in Target. Later when I went out to the parking lot I saw her out there still, fighting the girls to buckle them into car seats and I’m sure she was hurting them by the way she was twisting them around and she was still yelling and it was just horribly sad.

And then I went to the mall and saw all the teenagers and preteens hanging around, flirting with boys, doing whatever they do. You know, when I was 15 I had to beg my parents to let me meet friends at the mall and when they did I had a strict curfew. They DEFINITELY wouldn’t have let me go there by myself at 12, especially dressed up like a wee streetwalker and with way too much money to spend.

When I lived in Chicago I often went to a mall in Lincolnwood where the young Latinas would hang out on the weekends, with their babies and their parents’ credit cards. I can’t tell you how many teenage moms I saw in Express using their parents’ plastic to pay for some hoochie clothes while their babies cried in strollers laden down with shopping bags. And from their conversations you could tell that this wasn’t a once-a-month shopping spree. They did this every weekend.

This isn’t really a rant like I usually do. It’s just a state of the world that causes me immense sadness.

I wish they had a screening that they could do before they allowed people to bear offspring. That’s all.

We had a SNOWSTORM this morning.

What is that about?

I am cleaning house, doing laundry, and I just put a cake in the oven. I feel like Betty Crocker.

Plans for today: finish my laundry, change my sheets, shower, get dressed, perhaps take a trip out to Target to spend some of the money that theoretically isn’t in my account yet (but I can write checks, I get paid at midnight on Monday).

Then tonight I might be heading to C’burg to meet Suz to go to what sounds like a college party. Might be fun. I might go. Or then again I might not. I’m not entirely sure if I feel like drinking tonight.

But for now? Laundry, housecleaning, and a cake. Whee.

I get off work at 1 on Fridays, and today I decided to stop at BK and get lunch. So I ate my italian chicken combo and came back out to the car. I pushed the little unlock button and went to open the door, and just as I opened it, I saw a suspiciously familiar big-ass black hairy spider hauling ass at me from the back door.

SPIDEY RETURNED.

Sure, it could have been a completely different humungadunga black spider, but it was Spidey. I know because he said in a tiny spider voice, “Thought you killed me, eh bitch?”

I stood there quaking in fear. Then I dove into the car and grabbed a handful of napkins, knowing that they wouldn’t do the job. Then I slammed the door and stood there facing off with Spidey.

That bastard.

I decided that it would be a really good idea to kick him off the car with my foot. So the Timberlake Road entertainment of the day was the motorists watching short little me standing outside my car kicking in the general area of the window on the back door. That’s some majorly high kicking for my short-ass legs. Also, I missed Spidey every time and once he RAN ACROSS MY SHOE.

Spidey 1, Lorie 0.

He was all like “BOO-YAH.”

And then in a moment of true bravery, I lunged forward and punched him with the wad of napkins, screaming “DIE, FUCKWAD!”

I hit him. He did that thing where you curl all your legs up against you (if you’re a spider) and fell off the car, crying “NOOOOOoooooooo!”

Spidey 1, Lorie TKO! TAKE THAT!

But then I couldn’t find his body. So now I’m all afraid that he was faking me out and playing dead, and then crawled under my car while I was getting settled.

I guess if I encounter another humungadunga black spider in a few days and he has a suspicious limp, I’ll know it’s Spidey.

And then it’s really gonna be on.

I was an annoying, precocious little 7th grader who was a year younger than everyone else due to having skipped a grade. I competed in spelling bees and had a large vocabulary that I was really proud of. I was always learning new words and trying to integrate them into my daily conversations.

One day I ran across a new word somewhere and liked the sound of it. From the context clues of wherever I saw/heard it (which I don’t remember now), I guessed that it was a slang word, a word you’d use as a mild insult against someone who was kind of dumb or jerky. I couldn’t wait to use it in a sentence.

The word, my friends, was dildo.

The moment I chose to debut this word in my speaking was in my 7th grade social studies class.

After raising my hand.

So everyone was paying close attention.

I don’t even remember what I was talking about but I think it had something to do with the Gulf War. I was really just speaking so that I could use the new word. What I said was something like, “Well, maybe if there was someone who was a real dildo, then he wouldn’t understand why we were doing blah blah blah idiotcakes.”

My teacher, Miss Dale (now Mrs. Holt), who was one of the coolest teachers I’d ever had, actually busted out laughing and I never understood why. She never told me that it was an inappropriate word to say in a middle school class, but I’m sure she figured out that I had no idea what it was I’d said.

When the popular boys started making fun of me at lunchtime, I picked up that I’d used it wrong, but I still didn’t understand what the word really meant. I had no idea. So I just wiped it from my vocabulary then and there.

It wasn’t until years later that I actually figured out what the word meant, and what an ass I’d made of myself.

I bet that teacher still remembers me.