“Ooh Look guys! There’s an enormous alien squid that must’ve dove head first into the ground, died upon impact and has been rotting there for days, leaving his many legs, sticking out of the ground, all dried up and shriveled.”
“Mom. That’s just a big tree with no leaves on it.”
Poor kids. Their dreams of having a normal soccer mom have long been squelched and replaced with visions of alien squids invading the yard and frequent pleas to “here, take a bite of the dog cookie and tell me what it tastes like.”
Normal moms pack their little kids lunch bags with Kraft Lunchables, a Diet Coke, and a comic book. Not with organic rice krispie treats made from dehydrated carrots, a Do-It-Yourself home condensation kit for water, and the Time Magazine issue titled: The Dangers of PVC’s in Bottled Water; The New Way Kids Are Dying.
I think it’d be an eye-opening experience to be normal. To look at a tree, and see, just a tree. To Tivo Glee and watch it later as you eat your microwaved Ramen noodles. Invigorating. But for some reason, I wasn’t granted this opportunity. I often wonder if it’s because when my mom fell down the stairs when she was pregnant with me, she ruptured my Normality Sac. But whatever the reason, I missed that elevator, and got the next one.
When you’re normal, you think normal thoughts, do normal things. Enjoy a hot dog, go skiing, you trust doctors, eat Goldfish crackers, one day buy a Black Lab, and have 2.4 kids. I'm clearly abnormal because I just had 2 kids. Couldn't deal with the heartache of raising a forth of a child.
When you're normal, you get a normal job, file your taxes before the 15th, you cut your grass on the weekends, and you don’t obsess over looking for bugs in your brocolli. You sip egg nog during Christmas,and you never, EVER, get out of your car to yell at police officer because they gave you a ticket. Though I do admit, that was necessary and cathartic.
When normal people, say, want a waffle, they just make a waffle, and eat it. Normal people aren’t thinking of how if they quadrupled the batter recipe, they could make one giant waffle, that E’ggo could use as an employee shoe cubby down at the waffle factory. That would be probably be considered the precursor for psychiatric evaluation or the result of a staph infection that rooted in the brain somewhere behind your eye socket. But I still think the waffle shoe cubby could make millions. And lighten up corporate America.
Normal people love to fly in airplanes, the whole time thinking of arriving at their destination refreshed and already decompressed. They laugh, and sleep, and eat bags of peanuts while casually planning their business lunches. I fly planes eating bags of Xanax while manically planning my funeral as I'm mopping up my armpit sweat. I also generally demand the window seat so I can stare at the engine looking for sparks. Excuse me, but there’s zero reason to feel normal that you’re in the air
On a normal weeknight, normal people watch American Idol, Lost, and laugh and share stories and opinions about the characters and plots. While I’d rather sit on my couch and write a poem about how my dad never showed me he loved me, and hid the Twinkies on me when I was 7. And for the record, if friends are what you’re looking for, discussing your emotionally damaging childhood is bad bar conversation. Usually noting that my immediate people periphery ends up 9 feet away from me, appearing that I confessed to them I was diagnosed with Small Pox. The poem however, is actually coming out good. It’s called
“My Stinky Dad and His Stinky Fucking Twinkies.” No anger there of course, but I've digressed.
I am however, very happy to discover that there are a few miscellaneous entries to my daily life that haven’t yet deviated from the completely normal zone.
Clipping my toenails, for example, has fortunately still remained a rather normal experience. I set out to clip 10 toenails, and when I’m done, miraculously what I have is, 10 gross, clipped toenails. I’d be lying if I said at times I wasn’t tempted to make something out of them, like maybe something reminiscent of a popsicle stick house, and then give it to my dad for Fathers Day. But I usually shake it off and opt for a more straight forward thought…like the thought of accidentally clipping and severing a main artery from a hangnail, and uncontrollably bleeding out in the shower without ever having the opportunity to custom design and order my headstone in the shape of a large cement toe. But for the most part, the act of clipping toenails, pretty much mentally stays on point.
No easy task though. Instead of letting my mind run free like a death row inmate that spotted an open door, I just intently focus on my toenails, say the words “ clip toenails” over and over again, and try and think normal thoughts. But often what comes out are all the different words you can make with the letters:
“n-o-r-m-a-l t-h-o-u-g-h-t-s.”
“Hormonal thugs”, being one of my favorites.
I’m not sure this is too normal either; Sometimes I attempt to swallow a few vitamins at the same time, and somewhere between the vitamins reaching the back of my throat, and the glass of water meeting my lips, my throat snaps closed like a submerging whales blow hole. It immediately goes into a frozen state of instant paralysis thinking of the irony of choking to death while doing something healthy. So shut, it remains. I’ll stand there for what seems like days stranded on a desert island, with a mouth full of water and vitamins that are slowly disintegrating in the back of my throat, until I mentally trick myself into believing it’s something I'd have no problem swallowing. Like a wedge of strawberry shortcake the size of my foot. And then finally, the spastic vitamin ordeal is over and I swallow them. And miraculously survive. Normal people swallow their vitamins in one gulp and march off to work without already going through a dry run of the steps necessary to successfully employ The Heimlich Maneuver.
Thinking normal thoughts. Gee, life would certainly be much easier. Words would remain the words they were intended to be. A donut would simply remain “a delicious donut”, and not some government funded, masterminded plan to get me fat and permanently reliant on diabetes pharmaceuticals. Don't argue with me on that one.
A kiss would remain just a kiss, instead of some twisted subplot to steal my uvula and sell it on the black market.
The funny thing is, although I rarely feel like I’m the quintessential, normal, female, I know somewhere deep inside of me, I’m as normal as it gets. Really deep inside though. Like get on your head lamp. We’re going coal mining.
So how do I really know then? Well because I love way too many normal things. Like long walks, being with meaningful people, eating fresh strawberries, a great meal, the smell of clean sheets and freshly cut grass, a warm shower, a long kiss, hearing “I missed you”. But then again, I also love the smell of fresh horse crap. And Bam, there it is. Bye-bye normal, out the window you go. Nice to have briefly met. Now go play outside with the dried out alien squids on my lawn.
;)~
