My take on promises

I want to talk about promises. This has been on my mind a bit lately, and I wanted to share it with you. We make promises all the time. I made a promise 12 years ago to marry a man and love him forever. I was very young. I hadn't developed into the person I am now. I didn't know about the things I would learn as the years moved forward. We had a son together.

A promise assumes that we know what will come in the future. And I made the promise to get married and love someone forever without understanding how much of the future I had ahead of me. We had been together for 5 years, and at the time I figured that 5 years was enough time for me to get to know HIM. I hadn't given a second's thought to how long it would take to know MYSELF.

We make promises to other people. We make vows and say "until death do us part". We make commitments and say "you matter more to me than my own happiness". Our generation makes these statements, and yet we don't live by them. We get divorced. We call it quits. We move out. We separate when we become miserable. The divorce rate is up to some ridiculously high number. Yet people still get married, and they still make these crazy vows to be with one person no matter what. But they don't live it. We, as a society, don't live it.

I have this radical theory. We should recognize the way our generation goes about love. We should acknowledge that we don't really stay until death. We give up when it's awful. And I think maybe we SHOULD give up when it's awful. I want love. But I don't want to be with someone because they signed an agreement to stay with me despite how they feel about me. And I don't want to live miserably forever because at one point in my life it seemed like a good idea.

So what if we didn't say "Until death do us part"? What if we skipped that part entirely, and we said instead "Until we cannot be happy together". I think if we did that, we might treat love differently. We might appreciate our partners more. We might take an extra minute to check in and evaluate. We might not take love for granted. And we might make the commitment to be together, for the RIGHT reasons. Because of love. Not because of a promise.

That's so gay

What does it mean when someone says "That's so gay"? We hear this phrase all the time. In use it is akin to "That's so lame" or "That's so dumb". Often, the people who use the phrase don't intend to insult gay people and just think it's a catchy, kind of funny phrase. But the phrase "That's so gay" equates the word gay with being lame or being dumb. The phrase means that being gay is uncool, even if that's not the intended message.

A few weeks ago I was in a woman's washroom when I overheard another young woman say "That's so Jew!" I stopped dead in my tracks and asked her if she just said that. I thought what she said was impossibly disturbing. She admitted to having heard the phrase a few minutes earlier and thought she'd try it out herself. It seems she realized that it was a stupid thing to say and said she wouldn't say it again.

Now, in all honesty, I'm not the most politically correct person I know. Just today I walked up to a pride table (with fruit on it) on campus, signed up for the mailing list, and asked if the fruit on the table was 'gay people food'. Then I joked that I was eating my gay apple like a total homosexual. Because the fruit was on the gay pride table! I thought it was funny.

So, I'm not entirely PC all the time. But in public spaces, I think it's important to be aware of the meaning behind our words. The apple was delicious, by the way. Deliciously homosexual. So maybe "That's so gay" is okay with me if it means it's absolutely fantastic, like so fantastically gay.

What do you think?

The Epic Lego Solution

This post is my comedic bitch/rant about Lego, and contains mild swear words.

So my son loves Lego. He has played with Lego every single day of his life since the day he was old enough to play with it without choking himself to death by shoving it down his windpipe. And in his case that was probably before he was two years old. So the boy has a LOT of Lego. And he plays with it constantly. He enjoys it. He stays occupied. And while he insists on making me sit through a new rendition of “look at this new thing I made and what it does and what every little tiny miniscule detailed part is intended to do, and watch me fly it into your face several times” spiel every five and a half minutes (everything you’ve ever made looks exactly the same to me, sorry kid!) for the most part, his Lego thing works for me.

My big beef with Lego is that shit gets EVERYWHERE. And we live in a one bedroom apartment, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for his crap to be everywhere. (We live in a one bedroom apartment because as a single mom, I have no other bitches to pay for all this Lego, and I don’t know what I would do with this child if he didn’t have Lego).

I usually have two options. Suffer through the joy of walking all over makes-me-want-to-kill-someone Lego in my living room, or harass the boy to clean it up, every five-and-a-half-minutes. His response is always “But I’m still playing with it!” He’s always still playing with it. He never ever stops playing with it.

I’ve come up with a solution that I would patent if I had any hope of figuring that shit out and actually following through. I’ve created a Lego bag thing. Okay, fine, it’s only a sheet cut into a square with a hair elastic tied around the corner, but it’s genius, just listen: The boy can play with his Lego ON THE SHEET (Lego off the sheet is vacuum food) and when I get sick of the Lego being everywhere, I can lift up the corners, wrap the hair elastic around the top, and it is GONE. All the things he was working on are inside, and I am happy. He is happy. And I don’t have to feel like my living room is a minefield of Lego waiting to explode under my tender feets.

If you decide to patent this Lego bag yourself and make millions, remember me in my one bedroom apartment and cut me a slice, friend. :-)

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