What’s buggin’ me May 12, 2009

I got chainsaws buzzing around me right now. Our boxwood trees are coming down. I’m not gonna lie. I get a little choked up when I watch a tree fall. It’s a sad thing to cut off the life of a beautiful creation. But I think it was the boxwood elder beetle that crawled into my ear and took up residence one day that was the final straw for me. It was high time for those trees to go straight to hell.

At first, I thought the scratching in my ear was fluid build-up. I thought my ears were popping from the pressure at 30,000 feet. We were on our way to Chicago and I had been suffering from a pesky respiratory infection. Little did I know the peskiness of my condition had nothing to do with mucus and everything to do with a segmented thorax on an expedition to my tympanic membrane.

You’d think I would have had the sense to see a doctor. After all, when a relatively normal person detects a sudden chronic, irritating noise in her head, isn’t it standard protocol to deduce that something is amiss? But for better or worse… in this case, worse… my husband and I fancy ourselves naturalists. So instead of going to an MD, I went to our acupuncturist, who gave me a fancy remedy to “puff” into my ear. Neal had tried it before and said it worked wonders, however jarring the actual process.

I decided to give it a try and was fascinated with the results. It was like I could actually hear and feel the pressure dissipating. How could I have known that it was nothing of the sort… rather it was very much a little creature reeling from the impact.

The day it crawled out of my head, I was reaching to satisfy an odd ticklish sensation. It fell onto my hand, covered in the powder and left a trail on my outer ear. Needless to say, I was more than just a little stunned at the discovery. Mildly horrified would be accurate, which is when the call to the tree fellers occurred.

People think I’m nuts when I tell them the story. Rightly so. But as it turns out, there are over four million google results for “bug in the ear”. Thankfully, to my knowledge, very few incidents have resulted in death and/or deafness. One guy, a high school football player, had to have his bug surgically removed. He made the news!  Apparently the little varmint had done some pretty significant damage to the dude’s eardrum. I guess his little mandibles were having a grand old feast in there, which tells me that either football players have delicious ear wax or beetles have a bad sense of direction.

Sufficed to say, it’s a pretty revolting thought to envision a bug crawling around your head. One can’t help but wonder if they can get into your brain and do some serious damage. It certainly would explain a lot.

Just Breathe May 3, 2009

Lina and I were having one of our classic mother-daughter conversations while I was driving her to CCD the other day. She told me I would be very excited by what she had to say.

“Why is that, honey?”

“You won’t believe what is in my homework folder.”

She said it in that first-gradey, sing-song voice… the way Donkey sings when he’s searching inside the windmill for Fiona in the first Shrek movie: “Princess… It’s very spooky in here and I ain’t playing no games.”

I tried to imagine what could possibly be in her homework folder that would make me “very excited.” Was it a stack of fifties? A winning lottery ticket? One-way airfare to Italy?

“Soccer sign-ups is in there.”

She was pleased as punch to torment me with this information. She knows I get a charge out of watching her play, but she’s only played on a team once. She always acts like she’s not interested, but you wouldn’t know it by the way she kicks my butt in the backyard. Often after we finish clearing the dinner dishes, I’ll take her and Gianni out to the backyard and we’ll scrimmage. The back wall of the house is my goal and the side of the shed is hers. (G-man is the ref, but I have yet to get him an official whistle.) I have to say, the kid is good, real good and if futbol skills are transferred down the bloodline, it must come from the Petti strand of her DNA chain, because the Donnelly’s don’t have the ability nor the interest to pursue an evasive ball . Stick us on a battlefield or a fishing boat or a large comfortable chair, and we are in our respective elements. Kevin is the exception, but we think maybe he’s from space.

I asked her why I should be so excited about that, seeing as she wasn’t going to let me sign her up anyway.

“Because you love it when I play soccer,” she said, very much impressed with herself.

“You’re right, sweetie,” I said. “I do love when you play soccer.” I was immediately stricken ill at the very idea, aghast at the image of myself now as a thirty-something soccer mom. I checked my pulse, double checked that I wasn’t driving a mini-van, and dabbed at the sweat beginning to bead between my boobs.

“I’m real good at it, right mom?” she asked.

“Yes, you are really good at it, honey. How ’bout we sign you up?” I glanced at her in the rear view mirror to evaluate her reaction.

“Nah,” she replied. “I don’t want to.”She held her hand out the window watching it float on invisible waves of air.

One thing is for sure, the kid has always known what she wants. Her most passionate desires typically revolve around Spongebob episodes, chocolate, climbable trees and web-manipulated plush toys, but sports don’t seem to rank supreme.

In my own sly way, I attempted to subtly weave in the value of team sports, even if it meant refusing to openly admit how much I hated them myself when I was her age.

“Pickles, didn’t you have fun when you played soccer with Erin last year?”

Erin is her best friend, so I figured manipulation surely must have it’s benefits.

“I guess it was fun.”

“What was your favorite part?” I asked her, hoping to reel in the vision for her.

She thought about this for a moment and then replied with a sudden jolt of enthusiasm, “I like the break part!”

I laughed out loud. “The break part?”

“Yeah. The break part,” she said. “You know, when we stop playing and eat snacks and drink juice?”

“Oh okay,” I said with a chuckle. “Did you also like the part when you ran around kicking the ball with your friends?”

She thought about this and replied, “Yeah. I like that part too, but I like the break part best because after all that running, my breath was outta sight.”