🌶️ Go Ask Daddy About Spicy Commercials, Reserved Parking and the Home of the Demon Deacs

I think I remember you from my teenage years …

Long before Kesha and Jennifer Lawrence, way back on the timeline before Ingrid Michaelson and Laura Linney, in a time Hope Solo, Sue Bird and Paula Creamer were just youth-league cuties … there was the MCI girl.

Guys, this is Jean Louisa Kelly.

Her cute but creepy ad for the soon-defunct MCI became all sortsa Dream Weaver for me.  She resurfaced in Mr. Holland’s Opus, as star-dreaming Rowena Morgan in 1995. In 2000, you could see her in Yes, Dear, married to a dude even dweebier than yours truly.

I thought she’d disappeared after that feeble TV show.

Then I watched 1,000 to 1: The Cory Weissman Story. I resisted, invoking my “No Movies That Star Kids From Disney Shows” clause. But … Cory’s mom looked, so sweetly familiar. The curls were now straight; her lipstick less pow than fire-engine red.

Where Are You Going? 10 Questions for Direction

“Candy, as far as the eye could see. Almond Joy, Krackle, Skittles. Not the cheap-ass candy from the dollar store.”

To remain in this moment becomes perhaps the closest we can come to ultimate harmony. It’s tricky.

It requires dismissing the past, shunning self-imposed limitations and savoring every ounce of life. Living in the moment also gets a bad rap. That’s what happens when folks jet to Vegas or say yes when they should say no, invoking a Carpe Diem Clause.

The Carpe Diem Clause, however, doesn’t cover gambling losses, lost teeth, lost wages, marriage annulments or penicillin shots.

Brianna Wiest wrote a book called The Truth About Everything. She also wrote a post for Elephant Journal that I wrapped in cheesecloth and hid behind my disc golf bag. It’s 10 questions to ask yourself when you don’t know where your life should go next.

Go Ask Daddy About Cinematic Symbolism, Steve Martin Stunts and Retail/Dining options for Dec. 31

Do you know where that water’s been, brother?

NPR just made rain kind of gross.

A show promo pointed out that water we drink today has passed through the kidneys of a brontosaurus. Japanese freestyle swimmer Shigeo Arai probably swam through it in the 1936 Olympics.

It might have lived in a water pitcher on the set of the Dominican telenovela Tropico, too. I try not to think of that, but it’s true. Water’s the original repurposed thing.

Sure, rain’s kind of nasty, but it’s also beautifully poetic. It made up puddles my girls stomped in walking into the grocery store with dad. It helped soil uniforms – school and soccer – and locked in stories and memories and history.

Guest Post: Mo, of Mocadeaux, on Plethora

The search for the right word can sometimes be like this.

This one time, Grace thought she’d become famous.

All it took was a parade. We’d talked in church about joining the Pride Parade a few years ago. Grace heard keywords – parade … ride a float … matching T-shirts! She was stoked. So I explained what the Pride Parade meant.

She remained stoked.

We didn’t end up walking. She went off with the grandparents that day. The conversation happened, though. When I wrote about it, today’s guest poster, Mo of Mocadeaux, chimed in on the CD for the first time.

🎧 Go Ask Daddy About Joint Noise, TV Tech and What Happens When You Set a Stopwatch with The Good Book

I call this one, Distortion. Camdyn’s Coca-cola glass, though, also makes me thirsty.

I won’t divulge individual names right now.

Consider all three girls implicated, though. The injuries they’ve suffered number in triple digits. The injuries they’ve suffered have only a few been serious. The injuries they’ve suffered occurred at the hands of – their other sisters. Well, mostly.

Some are self-inflicted.

One kid suffered a hyper-extended elbow climbing into a cardboard box. One bruised a cheekbone opening a car door. One burned her hand when she touched a stove burner I just turned off. (These are all one kid. And she blames me for the last one.)

No Guest Post Here. How’s About 10 More Random Smartphone Photos?

Who just went 2.7 seconds on a parrot named Fumanchu?

Another week, another guest post lost.

My inbox contains buried treasure. In it, correspondence from friends far and near. Agreements to guest post. Inquiries into soccer teams. Catch-ups, and rundowns. It’s tons better than anything found in Al Capone’s vault, even.

I’m getting closer to taking up shovels and those little whisky brushes like Indiana Jones.

I hope when I return to emails I’ve yet to return, you haven’t given up on me. I’m coming around, I promise. It’s not a brushoff – rather, you’re swept up in a convex twister than relies on randomality and the universe to sit you front and center.

Here’s Hoping My Girls Have Friends Like This

Sisterhood can be a twisty thing. But it’s mostly illuminating.

I have three daughters.

I want much for them. Peace, not a pampered path. Purpose, not existence in pretend. Experiences, not empty days when the moon rises and sets without peace and purpose. I want to drive them places they want me to take them.

I want also for them to venture into places I am not.

The influence and support they’ll have from their parents will never cease. What of those times when she’s chosen to play on a new team, in a far-off park? When she’s on a stage somewhere I am not, rehearsing and projecting?

🧳 Travel Light. Wear Simple Clothes. Just Watch.

“Travel the world and the seven seas/ Everybody’s looking for something.” – Annie Lennox

Eloquent people seem to travel lots. Or maybe travel breeds eloquence. What do you think?

I don’t travel much. Unless you count drives to Mooresville or the trips I’ll take to the mountains for Elise’s games. There’s my annual work trip to someplace tropical every winter. When you travel, you pick up stories, whether it’s in Madrid or Marshville.

My friend Brittany tells stories of travel abroad and also to the junkyard in the blog Girl Interrupted, and its superb reading. The clarity of the scenes she sets? Downright Hemmingwayesque in its delivery.

My friend Britta writes It’s a Britta Bottle. She undertook a life shift to teach in Thailand. Her stories began when she made the choice and influence her writing today. Her adventures inspired this post.

Go Ask Daddy About Oafs, Sponge Years and Celebrity Breakups

“Laterz, Barack. Let’s kick it again sometime.”

“How in the world was I ever a student?”

In the midst of a work post, the utter stubbiness of my attention span – and ability to comprehend anything not about food, soccer or Star Wars – couldn’t be ignored. “They didn’t have as much stuff for you to learn back then,” Grace piped up.

“And they didn’t have all the ways we could learn stuff back then.”

Immediately I saw myself in my sabre-toothed tiger jumper, all Paleolithic-like in a schoolhouse like the ones on Little House on the Prairie. Oh, these kids.

3 Life Lessons I Learned From Pat Summitt

 

Dreaming of Lady Vols hoops. Photo by Grace.

Chick hoops.

That’s what sports departments I worked in called women’s basketball. Labels banter about safely in the presumed safety of like minds. Women’s athletics’ best chance at appreciation didn’t come through regard, admiration or respect.

More likely, it’d come from a news editor so enamored with tennis player Mary Pierce that he locked in every image the Associated Press moved on the wire of her.

The late Pat Summitt, the legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach, couldn’t have cared less what close-minded editors thought of her. Or what they thought of her program or gender or sport or place in a game they considered a man’s.