May 30th 10:00am - Airport Dementia

I booked a roundtrip flight from Auckland to LA for two weeks for a couple thousand dollars. Thank you California unemployment. My friend Jack got a roundtrip flight from LAX to Auckland for a week for four hundred dollars. She booked through a treasure trove. Jack is magical. She has an enchanted life where she can arrive at airports and get on flights she's booked.
Someone voodoo'd my airport life. I've been marooned in airports for days without money. The Swine Flu took me from Lima, Peru to Miami, Florida and then delivered me to my California destination three days later without luggage. Ganja and I went to San Francisco's airport without a visa for India. My flights get delayed and canceled. My planes get arrested because of diseases and bomb threats.
The weekend Jack was in New Zealand, Rob Awesome, MK Ultra, and Polly organized a reunion in Nelson. I traveled with the two Brits and Kiwi through India for a few months late last year. I found the cheapest flights to Nelson I could and handed my laptop to Jack.
"You'd better book them," I sighed.
"What? Why?" she reasonably questioned.
"I fall asleep taking standardized tests. I still have more of a chance of getting a good score on a test than I do booking flights."
I razzle-dazzled her with a sampling of my airline experiences.
"Okay. Flying Auckland to Nelson Friday, and Nelson to Auckland Sunday," she confirmed. "Look at this with me, so we can double-check."
I reviewed the screen with my 20/400 vision, and Jack clicked submit.
Thursday night, we went to Danny Doolan's bar. Before we went out, we shot back a bottle of whiskey. At Danny Doolan's, we boozed with beer, Jager, and a photo shoot.
While standing in line for the women's restroom, a male in the opposite line told us we should kiss. I kissed her neck. He told us we should kiss. I kissed her neck again. He told us we should kiss. Our lips met.
Briefly. An Aussie that looked a bit like a penis stalked Jack, so we left at three in the morning. Stepping out of the cab, I tripped over a tree root. At the airport the next morning, I was still leglessly drunk.
The morning after I've been drinking, my libido incites McDonald's lust.
"I need McDonald's," I told Jack.
"Me too, but we should probably check in first, because we're running late," she responded.
"I need McDonald's."
"You make a fine argument," she laughed, "But we should check in."
"I need McDonald's," I cried.
I have a male one-track mind for McDonald's when whiskey still slides through my brain waves.
"Okay, if we see McDonald's before we get to the check-in, we'll stop. If not, we'll get it after we check in."
When we checked in, the airline representative gave us our tickets to fly out that day, and mentioned our return on Saturday, the next day.
"No, we booked return for Sunday," we enlightened her, "We even double-checked."
"You booked your return flight for Saturday," she repeated.
"But we're going for the weekend, not just for one night. That doesn't even make sense," we argued.
"Your return flight is for Saturday," she iterated.

May 23rd 8:17pm - Peanut Butter and Nipples

The mom I work for has weaned four children. She's on her fifth kid and can't get him to stop inhaling her titties. Weaning hasn't taken more than three days with the other four.
Yesterday the mom swung into the kitchen exclaiming, "My fifth child is sucking the life out of me. Literally." She started crying.
I was staring at a wall in a semi-comatose child overdose. I blinked four times and turned towards her. She just meant she was over her nipples getting gnawed. When babies sprout teeth, nipples should not go in their mouths. It's dangerous. Males wouldn't offer their penises to piranhas.
For three weeks, the mom has been attempting to get her son off her knockers and onto a sippy cup. I know more about crocodiles than I do children. But I think most kids progress from boobs to bottle to sippy cup. Every time the mom tries to give her baby the cup, he screams like he's being tortured by yetis. She says she's tried everything. Today, she put me in charge of feeding him so she could pick up garters for her daughters. When I think of garters, I think of lingerie and strippers. Her daughters are five and seven years old. I didn't ask.
I plopped the baby on the floor and gave him the sippy cup to play with. He cried when he looked at it. I filled it with formula and sat him on my lap. I sang to him. I kissed him. He screamed. I ate a banana with peanut butter and considered pouring some of the formula down the sink so I could show the mom that he'd drunk some. I'm not the most clean food consumer, and when I resumed the attempt at forcing formula down the seven-month-old's trachea, peanut butter traced my hand. I slathered the sippy portion in peanut butter. For the first time, the baby drank formula. After a half hour, two tablespoons of peanut butter, and one hundred milliliters of fake breast milk, the mom returned home.
"I found a way to make him drink," I announced, holding up the peanut butter jar and a more proud smile than the time I got out of a foreign language requirement in college by claiming foreign language disability.
"My baby ate peanut butter?" she cried.
Note: Kids aren't supposed to consume peanut butter until they're over a year old, as they could be allergic.
The mom watched the baby for the next twelve hours like it might go blind.

May 18th 4:15pm - Baby Balls Mix-Up

My knowledge of babies and children has mushroomed in the past few months. I now know shit. Intimately. I know diapers, feeding child mobs, locating unwanted bunnies, and all about little penises. My brother lectured me that I couldn't tell the three-year-old not to play with himself, as he would have psychological masturbation issues when older. My mom told me to entice little kids to bathe by creating bubble baths. I am now a bubble bath lord.
Tonight, after the bubble bath that three of the children resolved to get into together, the bathroom floor was an inch deep in water and three inches deep in bubbles. The mom observed the explosion and asked me to bathe the baby and then get him ready for bed while she and her husband read the kids stories.
The bathtub edge is three feet too high to comfortably kneel on the floor and cup the baby's head in my hand above the water. The tub rim attacks my armpits like rabid Indian monkeys and, after previously bathing the baby for two nights, my back felt like it had been trampled by a raging elephant. After those baths, I shuffled around for three days knowing I needed an old-people walker.
When the baby lays down splashing in the tub, I torture my back to hold the baby's head. Solution: I sat him up in the water and sat myself on a child footstool by the side of the bathtub. As I cracked my back, the mom entered with the three-year-old to brush his teeth. She screamed. The baby has only been able to sit up without assistance for six days. At the mom's request, I leaned him back. He pissed in the bath water.
I soaped him in the urine-water and then carried him in a towel to the changing table in his bedroom. His balls aren't giant anymore, but they do get red boils on them. The mom clubbed her head into the room to remind me to put Vicks Vaporub on the baby's chest, as he had a cough, and Sudocrem on his balls, for the boils. The mom left, the baby started to roll over, and I seized a jar of cream and smeared it across his sack. He screamed. I had switched the Sudocrem and Vicks. I had coated the baby's testicles in Vicks. The vaporub smells like Icy Hot.

** Published by The Short Humor Site in July 2010 as, "Baby Balls."

May 9th 11:10am - Contacts and Blindness

I first noticed that I have the eyesight of an ninety-year-old man when I was twelve and couldn't read the homework assignment on the board. I copied it off a classmate. I sat in the second row.
When I was thirteen one of my teachers donated a cardboard box to my eyesight. I used it as a desk. Every time we had to copy notes from the board, I rummaged out of my seat to the front of the classroom and sat two feet from the whiteboard with the cardboard on my lap. Sometimes I fell asleep.

For the past few hours, my left eye has been more annoying than the bonkers hobo in San Francisco who sits on the sidewalk, wears sunglasses, and points a hairdryer at every person who passes him. The hairdryer isn't plugged in. He makes noises.
I took out both of my contacts, but my left eyeball still felt defective. I pulled out two halves of another contact. The second lens in my eye had been ripped in two. I have no idea how long it's been spinning around in there effecting my optics. It's like not knowing how you lost a tampon in your vagina. Five-year-olds are more superior with their lenses than I am.
The dad I au pair for is one of New Zealand's leading eye surgeons. He's told me he'll get Lasik eye surgery done on me as a thank-you. This is one motivation to stay.

May 7th 10:45am - May 2010 Quote of the Month

Yoda: "He was a cum stain Saturday night. One girl almost yelled rape on the dance floor. Another cried."

May 2nd 6:24pm - Spitting

I spit. Not when I'm shopping for ball gowns. But I spit when I play soccer, when I run, and when I feel the context calls for it. If I'm at a bar and a male tells me I'm fuckable, I'm either going to spit at him or kick him in the balls. I'm a lady. If saliva mounts in my mouth because of physical activity and I feel like I am going to have a heart attack, I'm going to spit. It reenergizes me, and then I feel like I can breathe. The run I habitually consummate threads along Auckland's Waitemata Harbor. I gaze at downtown Auckland, boats, and Auckland residents in the most recent season's Nike work-out gear. For women, this comprises spandex running pants with matching tank-top, hat, socks, and shoes. I run in a soccer shirt and soccer shorts. I brought two sets of each to New Zealand.
Last week I was stretching when a woman who looked like someone's great-aunt who has had three strokes toddled to me, placed her hands on either side of my face, and asked if I was alright.
"Yes... are you okay?" I responded.
"Of course. You just looked... are you sure you're okay?"
"Definitely. Thanks," I said with a smile. I'd been stretching for three minutes but must have looked like I was suffocating.
Today, three miles in and my drool pyramided in my chops. I took three strides while gathering my froth and then spat a colossal loogie towards the water. A few more steps, and then I heard the screaming through my headphones. I stopped and turned to observe a fifty-year-old man stationary on the sidewalk. He held my spit in his hand. He wiped the side of his face with the back of his hand. Auckland harbor's wind is boisterous and must have blown my saliva on his face. I apologized as vehemently as if I had run over his child. I offered for him to spit on me. His response, "I. Don't. Spit." Five minutes later I left him, me still apologizing, him still foaming at the mouth.
When I returned to the house for a glass of water, the mom I au pair for asked me how my run was. I relayed the spitting episode to her. The grandma walked out of the pantry looking as horrified as if I had injected heroin into her eye. The mom did not look amused.
"People in New Zealand don't spit," the mom informed me, "unless they're brushing their teeth."
Apparently Kiwis don't launch spit when working out or doing physical activity. Kiwi females also don't drink beer. They drink wine or spirits. I spit and drink beer. I swear I was raised properly.