Category — Minutiae

/bôspäd/ (say bospod)

noun 1. An iPod containing nothing but the music of American singer-songwriter Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen, nicknamed “The Boss”. Normally used to entertain groups of adults on road trips in the United States of America.

When I was a kid, I loved MAD. Oh I used to guffaw while reading it, wearing my Garfield glasses (which came with wind-up windscreen wipers), tapping my bubble pipe, slapping my knee as I cried ‘So true! So true!’ while I read The Lighter Side of…

Those were the days.

Edit: My mum also just reminded me that for years I had a Bart Simpson-shaped alarm clock that said ‘Yo dude! Time to get up and get out of bed!’

I had to end Bart’s life when he started talking in the middle of the night.

I judge coffee addicts. I judge those people who are all ‘Oh, I need my morning coffee or I can’t even function!’ and I think to myself, yeah, it must be really hard to function in your adult house, while you select your adult shoes from your adult cupboard before you kiss your adult [or hopefully adult] partner before he/she heads out to their adult career. I make that association when people talk about coffee, that or I think about Christina Aguilera because many coffee names sound like Lady Marmalade lyrics.

However, until today it didn’t occur to me that I am a hypocrite, because I drink V all the time [no Mum, not all the time, once or twice a morning and never in the afternoon or before bed] and it’s caffeinated. And I go crazy. And the dev department feel it necessary to tell me that they had to quit V after drinking seven of them in one night to stay awake at nightclubs and I’m displaying signs of V addiction and they would know. And I was all ‘Hahaha! What’s a nightclub?’ 

Cut to downtown Queenstown. It is cold, much too cold for December, and it is raining. Three tall people, well…two tall people and one average person who rides on the coattails of her husband and daughter’s tallness, stand huddled under the awning of a shop on their last day of holidays.

For the eleventeenth time, the mother says ‘Do you have your little bag of stuff? If you don’t, I’m not going to go back for it’ and the daughter sighs ‘Yes Mooma, I have the little bag of stuff’.

The family make a run for it, dodging other, slower tourists, in their quest to find somewhere to shelter from the rain before lunch, and then the airport.

As they jog along, the daughter, for reasons unknown to even herself, turns to her mother and says ‘You know, you’re a mother. And I don’t mean in the parental way, I mean in the ghetto way’.

Without missing a beat, even in rain, even wearing slippery thongs, the mother swiftly kicks her daughter in the backside and they jog on.

I mentioned that one gloomy Saturday morning, when I had woken far too early and felt hungover despite not drinking much the night before [yes, I am talking about this morning], that I found myself explaining my job to my cat.

My friend Fiona, of Hello Fiona fame asked if The Wuz’s eyes glazed over.

My response?

‘She can lick her own eyeballs’.

Not exactly the answer to Fiona’s question, but true nonetheless.

I just read this on John Mayer’s Tumblr, and this, this exact thing explains my sleeping problem:

When I was a kid, I played a few sports, badly.

Dad was way more into the sports I played than I ever was. He ended up being my netball and hockey coach at various points. I can only imagine the experience would have been better for him if I actually had some kind of co-ordination or interest.

Cut to a hockey field in the depths of a bitter Orange winter. Julia is perhaps nine or ten years old. Play is down the other end of the field and as Julia watches this, miserably, she also realises the elastic in her underpants is, well, unreliable. She can perhaps run two or three steps before the risk of losing her underpants altogether becomes too great.

Soon, the thought of exposing herself to her team, the other team and various mothers, fathers and other adult carers takes up all her concentration. She practises trying to run with her hockey stick, whilst simultateously holding her underpants up as subtly as possible. It works, but just barely. She feels some relief. She may not be able to actually chase after the ball if she manages to hit it, but she may just well get away without anyone noticing her dilemma.

Soon, the other team wrests control of the ball and play starts to head towards Julia, who is at this time sure she’s got this whole one handed hockey playing thing down pat. She runs for the ball when suddenly a noise louder than any siren or whistle ever made booms across the field. It is Julia’s dad, yelling at the top of his lungs as he runs along the sideline.

‘JULIA! Can you leave your undies alone for a second and keep your eye on the ball?!’

I think that was my last season of hockey.