An Open Letter to Baby Joey

Dear Baby Joey,

I know what you're trying to do; it's called playing hard to get. What you don't know is that I thrive on rejection. See, I've been training for twenty-one years to meet a man like you. You're the ultimate challenge.

Firstly, they say the way to a man's heart is food, and yet despite your enormous girth, you won't eat. Salty num nums make you gag, cheese balls disgust you, even cake baked with not only love but also four solid pounds of confectionist sugar cannot sway you. I am at a loss. Today I shoved a puff in your mouth, four minutes later you vomited up everything in your stomach. If you think you're the first man to blow chunks upon contact with me, you are way out of your league brother. But maybe you're right, maybe I shouldn't force you. Alas, I try another route.

This is a cake that took 36 hours of my life to make, he didn't eat it, and I can't ever get that time back.

These aforementioned experts also say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus, when you deliberately "E I E I" and ditch the "O," I try to be trendy and original as well. I "E I E I" until the cows come home, literally. I'm on that farm Joey, it's me, not Old McDonald and I don't know why you can't see that. I'm the "ut" to your "oh." I'm 7 letters away from that Duck you keep babbling about. I try to be just like you, and mimic you even when you aren't around, and yet still, you reject me.

Recently, you've begun to exert your dominance. You march around the house like a drunken Nazi, Heiling anyone who will look at you. But will you let me join your superior ranks? No. You won't. For God's sake you even Heiled The Appraiser who was here for twenty minutes-- I've lived here for a week!

You give me this look that's rooted in anger. It happens after your naps and when you are in your high chair. You gawk at me like an intruder, like I've stumbled into some private party in the middle of a congratulatory speech. I try everything, silly noises, funny faces, injuring myself, even defeat. I look up slowly, hoping to see a trace of hope on your chubby cheeks, but it's always the same, it's always that icy glare staring back at me.

But what's worse Baby Joey, is that you're fucking with me. Sometimes you have this massive smile on, it's so big your eyebrows bend in and your teeth gleam wildly. You come charging toward me, like I am the only woman for you, and then just as I put my arms out, you bang a hard turn and go straight for whatever lifeless inanimate object is lying on the floor. AS IF IT'S MORE FUN THAN ME. You play with this thing for hours, you treat it like I treat you, softly cooing it's every utterance, one after the other, in perfect harmony. I'm left to watch, like an ex-husband through a frost bitten window.

I thought things would change once we moved in together. We had met once before but it was brief, my knowledge of you was entirely crafted out of hearsay and tear-stained photographs I'd saved. I would keep you in my phone, quietly dreaming up our lives together. I thought we could stay up late, watching Dora, while your parents went out on the town. I would let you have an extra cookie and play Mother May I, and you'd love me, like the kids back home did. Boy was I wrong.

(These are not the only photos I have of my new nemesis, but they all look like this, for obvious reasons.)

I try to communicate with you, I ask "what can I do to make you love me?" You just scowl back, muttering something, speaking in tongues. Well Fuehrer Joey, challenge accepted. High Chair, tomorrow, same time. I'll bring the rattle.

All the love in the world,
Cousin and Roomie Danielle

Mother Nature Is Out To Get Me

My life before The Biggest Lavoie consisted of diligently avoiding any and all physical activity. I was never one for sports, I chose to be artistic instead. That's the choice you get as an adolescent, either you can be athletic and coordinated, or you can be chubby enough to eat your own finger paints using glitter glue as a condiment. I chose the latter. That was until the truth teller showed up in our living room. This addition to our home made me painfully aware of exactly how much glitter glue I had been eating all these years--numbers don't lie, if you know what I mean. This was when we decided, as a family, to exercise regularly (two words I've never used in company with one another.)

My dad and I's exercise routine includes the following:
25 minutes of uphill walking on the treadmill, sweating like a trucker in July and cursing the high heavens for the incline setting.
10 minutes of what feels like sprinting until my lungs explode, which is actually just a 10 minute mile for normal humans.
This one is followed by many minutes of repeating the mantra "don't puke pig" while slowly walking, hunched over.
15 minutes on the bike alternating between spikey little cliffs of doom that mean "hill" on the random mode.
Exactly one set of 12 reps on any given machine. (I don't have the heart or will power to tell my dad that this one is doing nothing for us.)
20-30 minutes of congratulatory boasting to one another. "Awesome sweat ring! It almost connects!" "Did you notice my RPMs on the bike? KILLED IT."

In addition to that I also attend The Way in Cranston (cue shameless advertising here) once a week. Here the workout is different every time, but what is the same is that a man, not much older than me and often times cripplingly handsome, yells at me for a solid hour while I do a variety of strenuous and exhausting tasks literally holding on by my fingernails to the time when they call "water." At that point, like an animal drinking from a trough, I gallop over to the cooler and gulp as much water as my fat little cheeks can store. Usually, around my third cup they start to glare at me, because of course I'm stalling, and I crawl over to the next station beginning the torture anew.

But last week was different. I wanted more. It was beautiful out, I hate the gym, and I suggested the unthinkable: change the routine. My dad, flabbergasted, fought tooth and nail for our normal regiment, but reluctantly gave in when I said we could do both. The alternative? Kayaking. Hard.

(This is him doing his impression of Aziz Ansari on the kayaking commercial)

Now, I should explain here that everything with my father is a project, but that post would take all night. Let's just say after roughly one hour of planning, we were in the car headed to Big River at Rt. 3, because it has two separate paths and it's his favorite.

Everything started out dandy, we were winding along, admiring the scenery, checkin' out lily pads, and tut tutting about the weather. It was leisurely at best, not at all the rapids I had envisioned myself kayaking through. My outdoors experience is about as limited as my history with sports; so, to someone who's normal idea of "wild life" is confined to dryer lint particles and the occasional bug graveyard collecting in their light fixtures, this place was outstanding. Breathy and panting every few seconds I would shout something like "Dad, LOOK AT ALL THESE ANIMALS, AND WATER BUGS!" "What's that bird called?" "DO YOU  THINK THERE'S FISH IN HERE?" He would ignore me. I blamed it on the fact that he was ahead of me, but I really think he was just choosing not to respond. Later, when he spotted a lump on a log and I had a mini-stroke he sighed "at least we saw a fucking turtle." 

That was until we entered a deep, dark, tunnel...

At first glance, the other side of the tunnel seems fine. But in reality, it was forbidden territory. Like something out of a horror film, the beast emerged from his cave, he scaled the hillside and leaped into the water, pistol loaded. "WHAT THE MOTHER FUCK IS THAT!?" I screeched as the monster stalked toward me. "TURKEY? DUCK? DINOSAUR?!?" At this point, my dad is fumbling for his camera, and I am paddling away as fast as I can. I've tried to save my father once before, I was not risking my life for him this time. "It looks like a damn chicken!" He calls from behind the lens. What it looked like, was a gang member. If a bandana had been tied to his head and a teardrop tattooed to his face, this thing could have passed for the most deadly of gang luminaries. And we were on his turf! If there were more of these misfitted crossbreeding chuckdurkies living in these woods, I was leaving. Fast.

Thank my father for this photo because blog worthy or not, you're fucked if you think I was gonna snap a candid of Chachi the Chicken while he was inches away from my jugular, knife between his beak.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes right now, and you think that this hybrid monster is not so bad and I am being a yellow-bellied sissy, well, you're wrong. And if you want to be right, start your own blog elsewhere. 

Naturally, due to my agility and swift kayaking skills I survived this attack.

However, only a few short weeks later, I had yet another close call. Minding my own business, looking forward to the beach, my cousin and I ventured down the back roads hoping to avoid traffic. Unfortunately, we failed to factor in suicidal deer, and were granted access to a prime specimen in a near fatal collision. The deer sprang from the thicket, I don't know what a thicket is really but I think this is what it was, and went straight for the passenger side door. At this point, a normal person's fight or flight reflex will kick in, I'm sad to report I do not have this. I slammed on the breaks, white knuckled the steering wheel and howled a low guttural noise, much like this, only not in slow motion. Luckily, the deer missed my car by a few inches and rolled under another car driving in the opposite direction, he then did a tuck and roll type action and sprang away into the woods. No obvious injuries to speak of. After that, I began to question what I have done wrong to deserve these vicious attacks. I came up with nothing.

Please note that had I written this in the timely fashion that I had intended to, it would have been posted before YET ANOTHER mother effing deer ran into the road and at my car. This happened on the drive to Chicago mere minutes into our journey. The bastard lurched into the middle of the highway and then gave us the stereotypical deer-in-headlights-look, because deer really are extremely unoriginal and pointless. However, I did learn that I most likely inherited my slug like defense from my father because he too, slammed on the breaks and braced himself for the attack, rather than hitting the bitch or running away, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have known to do.

More on this road trip later. For now, I'll leave you with this adorable cartoon that I stole from the interweb when I searched "deer getting hit by cars."

Mini Post: Internet Illiterate

People of the Internet, let's clear the air shall we?

Recently, I've begun these mini posts. My cousin brought to my attention that my normal posts are both long and boring, he does not want to read a short story on this piece of shit, and he does not think other people do either. Okay. Your complaint has been filed with the management and they are fixing the problem slowly.

Thus, I've decided to begin a series of mini posts, most of which will be conducted from my phone. I thought this was cool. I was like, this is totally what iPhones are meant for and I am SO GLAD I'm using this TOTALLY AWESOME feature. (That's how I sound in my head, like the volume is being constantly adjusted incorrectly by a toddler.) And so, the previous post, was written in said fashion and I was completely blown away by how efficient and tech savvy I was for doing it. Plus, it was so short and poignant that it was sure to hold everyone's attention, even lazy assholes who don't appreciate comedic gold when it smacks them in the face. (Yeah, JESSE, you.)

Moving on, so as to keep your attention, dear readers. I was unable to post from my phone, using the phone format thing, because I had not previously logged on with a computer. This seems ridiculous to me, but I guess it is totally normal to people who use their phone for more than Maps, Instagram, Facebook, Calling and Texting. My iPhone however, is essentially a glorified vessel for failure. It mocks me every day.  Thus, I used Safari, as a normal web page and basically posted the way I post at home, only it was super tiny and difficult to read, and it TOOK FOREVER. There was a lot of cursing involved. Then the post sat for days and I was so proud of it, like I had created this tiny beautiful internet gem. Then my aforementioned cousin's wife found a typo. And the reality of my ineptitude settled full force. Because, when you have the vision of a bat, and the technological understanding of an 86 year old, posting from your phone is both unwise and destined for failure.

So, just to be clear, in addition to long winded stories, equipped with pictures and metaphors and hilarious links and basically anything and everything you could ever want in a blog, duh, there will also be grammatically incorrect, misspelled and lack luster mini posts every so often. Because that is what the people want, and I'm a people pleaser.

Mini Post: It's All Greek To Me

I am Greek, I went to Greek school for three years and dropped out. I cannot speak a word of it, and I can understand one to six basic phrases, my entire family suffers from this. However, Greek people love that they're Greek. It's the most important thing about them. That is why when someone mentions anything that lends the opportunity to illuminate our heritage we jump at the opportunity. At this point, most Greeks when meeting other Greeks shout something in their native tongue and I say "ohhh!" and flail my arms widely feigning understanding. I say this in an accent, which mimics an elderly Greek woman's accent, hoping to channel some sort of ingrained primal fluency. It never works. And I wonder what they are saying to me, but more so that I've missed something important like "I OWN A VILLA IN CRETE COME STAY FOR FREE!" or "I HAVE A GYRO IN MY POCKET, WANT A BITE?" Sometimes they say two quick phrases. The first I "ohhh!" at, the second I shout a short definitive "ah." this one is accompanied by two hands pointed outward, and my elbows close to my sides. It means, I understand, I feel the same way. Consequently, I've never stayed in Crete and I've bought all my own gyros, but I think I'm making progress, because just now I laughed and screamed "KALA" which means good, and I'm not sure in which sense. But The Greek I Was Speaking To ate it right up, and gave me three restaurant names in Chicago who have excellent Greek cuisine. So I'm ready to fake it til I make it out there, and I think I'll do just fine.