All Star = Fun, Joy, No Complaining
Pop Warner = Hell

Saturday kicked off the cheerleading competition season in the Evil household. We are officially living in “Cheer World” as Maniacally Evil Husband so aptly puts it. This season isn’t as insane as it has been in past years because Gaz isn’t on an allstar team this year. She took the year off to work on her tumbling skills and truthfully, we just couldn’t afford it. I’ll have to do a whole entry on the world of allstar cheerleading.

Anyway, Gaz is doing pop warner cheer this year. Which she hates immensely, the only thing that motivates her not to quit is her friends Claire and Sofie …

and Lauren and J’la

I swear, if I had known how much drama this was going to cause, I wouldn’t have let her do this. But then it wouldn’t be cheerleading without drama.

Exhibit A - I hate this uniform!

It’s itchy, hot and (the horror) frumpy!

Exhibit B - Why do I have to go to this stupid game?

No one cares that we’re there, only 3 of us are going to show up and I get in trouble for actually watching the game. Isn’t that the whole point? The game?! Gah!

Exhibit C - My shoes, the bottoms are all brown from the stupid track now!

“Oh, and did I mention it’s hot. And this uniform is itchy. And there’s only 3 of us here.”

Exhibit D - The cheering part, that’s just stupid.

“We’ve got spirit… okay, not so much.”

Exhibit D - Why is the game so long?

“Is it over yet? Is anyone even paying attention?  Did I mention that I hate this hot, itchy, frumpy uniform?”

Yeah, I enjoy driving to what may be the scariest neighborhoods in the Austin area to be eaten by fire ants and watch my daughter complain. Oh, boy is that fun. Um, okay, not so much. MEH has washed his hands of the whole thing. Both Gaz and I are not allowed to bitch and complain about anything Wolf Pack related. Otherwise, he just sticks his fingers in his ears and goes, “Not listening.” Kind of like the Happy Bunny.

But not really. No, he really doesn’t do that, because he’s got a “mental mute” button that he hits when the females in the Evil household start bitching.

So Gaz is sticking it out. Because a commitment is a commitment, blah, blah, blah … and due to the fact that MEH and I said she could compete in individuals if she got good grades in the first 6 weeks of school. Since she got straight A’s, individuals it is. More on that later.

Why does this entry seem familiar? Oh, because I posted almost the same entry here. Ugh!

and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Hmm, does that mean that when I die, I can go right on to whatever afterlife awaits me? Cool. While all you bitches who brag about getting at least 7 hours of sleep a night are paying your “interest”, I’ll be cordoning off an area of Hell for the all the events I’ll be responsible for coordinating as Hell’s Official Events CoordinatorTM. Sweet.

I haven’t slept more than 4 hours a night in the past month, give or take a day or two. I haven’t slept more than 2 hours a night in the past 2 weeks. I haven’t slept more 8 hours since Saturday.

What’s weird is that last night I slept for maybe an hour, I fell asleep somewhere between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. when Ken called with my wake up call because some defense mechanism in my sleep-thirsty brain kicks in and incorporates the alarm into my dream, rendering it useless. However, the Incrediphone (no that fugly table is not in my house) is amazingly effective at waking me up and since MEH is just wrapping up his workday at 5:30 a.m., he is now a human alarm clock.

I’m more scared than tired right now, though. Actually, I’m scared because I’m not tired. About 20 years ago, [Did I actually just type “20 years ago”? Yes, I did. *screams* Holy dinosaur, Batman! Has it really been that long? OMG, I am officially old!] I was working full-time and going to school at night part-time (if you want to call 15 credits per semester part-time), on Thursday and Sunday nights I would bartend and on Friday and Saturday nights I was a club/nitelife reporter for a local radio station. I was a sophomore in college and averaging about 10 hours sleep a week. This wouldn’t be too bad if it was for the week before midterms or finals, but it was for an entire semester. At one point, I had a night when one of my classes got cancelled and I actually got home, got my work done and was able to get to bed before midnight.

I couldn’t sleep.

No matter what I tried I couldn’t sleep. The next night, same thing. And the next night, and the one after that. I would fall asleep and wake up about 20 minutes to a half hour later “ready to take on the day” awake. The first week — I wasn’t tired, I was functioning. Week 2 — not so bad, a little tired is all. By Week 3 — out of my freaking mind. Something snapped and I couldn’t function. I could go through the motions of work, school, etc., but I don’t really remember much of it. Scary, huh? It was kind of like how it is when someone who drinks so much they black out — only without the forgotten bar brawl, inevitable D.W.I. with vehicular manslaughter and subsequent jail term.

I was over my then boyfriend’s house one night when the movie Into the Night was on HBO. It freaked me out. This conversation (or something similar to it - give me a break it was over 20 years *screams* ago!) ensued:

BF: What’s wrong?
ME: What do you mean?
BF: You’ve got that look on your face.
ME: Oh, do you mean the “OMG! I’m just like Ed Okin and I haven’t slept more than 20 minutes a night for the past three weeks” look? Because if that’s the look your talking about. Um, yeah, that’s what’s wrong.

For the next two weeks or so he drove me insane. Everyday we would have this phone conversation:

BF: How are you doing?
ME: Good.
BF: Did you sleep more than an hour last night?
ME: Um, no.
BF: So how can it be that you’re “good”?
ME: Hmmm.

I don’t know what was worse, not sleeping or being interrogated about not sleeping. One night I was at his parent’s house and was lying on his bed in his old room while he typed up a paper for me on his computer because I had lost all ability to spell at that point. I fell asleep.

I fell asleep. Fully clothed, on his bed, in his parent’s house! The horror. It gets worse. He tells his mother, who calls my mother and they decide it would be best to just let me sleep. So they threw a comforter on me and let me sleep — for 52 HOURS STRAIGHT!!! I know, right?

Is there a point to this post? Oh, yeah, I’m kind of freaking out that the above scenario is going to repeat itself — well, with some changes in the cast and location. The whole “not being able to sleep even if the opportunity presents itself” thing scares the crap out of me. Especially now that I have actual responsibities.

I’ll find out tonight. I only have a couple of things to get done after Gaz and Rico go to bed, so maybe I’ll get some sleep and this freaking-out-ness is just normal sleep-deprivation-driven paranoia.

I hope so. *sigh*

Okay, so how cool is Fern Mallis?

Verbally flipping Michael Kors the bird when he was giving Uli a hard time about being inspired by where she lives (Miami), so Uli was all, “Schritt weg, Michael, should you like me to move to New York where zhere is no color and no beautiful prints???”

I love Michael Kors, but his reaction must stem from after this quote from Tim Gunn’s kudos to Uli for her collection on his blog Tim’s Take:

Uli really pulled it off. Our queen of easygoing Caribbean fashion executed a collection that belonged alongside Michael Kors in the category of Seventh Avenue ready-to-wear.

Snap.

Oh, and Jeffrey won.

YouTube + TMX Elmo = this

You watched the whole thing, didn’t you?  Admit it.  I won’t think any less of you.  Really.

Brought to you by Culture Cola — Rockstar Mommy’s new pop culture blog.

… Fathers’ role in housework sharply increases. *shock*

I read the article above after hearing it discussed during my morning commute yesterday.

Quick synopsis - of in spite of the increased number of women working outside the home, moms are spending at least as much if not more time with their kids than moms did 40 years ago. Also, that dads are pitching in.

Fathers have picked up some of the slack. Married fathers are spending more time on housework

Um, duh. Parenting and housekeeping have become a team effort. I don’t get why this seems like such an alien concept to some people. My mother always tells me how lucky I am that MEH helps out with the kids and housework. Why am I lucky? I work full time and contribute to the family income — it should be a given that my husband, who contributed to the existence of said kids and the mess that we refer to as our home, helps out. Psst, don’t tell him or else he’ll be all full of himself, I’ve got to give serious props to because, dude, if he didn’t do the laundry, it wouldn’t get done. Ever. Um, really.

“We might have expected mothers to curtail the time spent caring for their children, but they do not seem to have done so,” said one of the researchers, Suzanne M. Bianchi, chairwoman of the department of sociology at the University of Maryland.

That’s because some of us have come to the realization that being a parent and actually raising our kids ourselves is a pretty fulfilling thing. Oh, and having a life is more important than having a career. More fun, too.

“They certainly did curtail the time they spent on housework.”

This is the line of the article that one of the hosts named “Sgt. Sam” harped on with the most distain. I don’t listen to this morning show much, so maybe it’s this guy’s role to be the critical one. I don’t know, but he really pissed me off.

Guess what, dude, there are only 24 hours in the day. In those 24 hours I work for 8 of them, spend about 2 hours getting to and from work, my kids have activities that they expect me to take them to or pick them up from. There is homework to be checked, baths to be given and quality time to be spent. (By the way, I hate that term “quality time”) Oh, and I’m in the process of starting my own business and at some point I’d like to get some sleep.

So if the dishes are piled up to the ceiling in the sink, the laundry is stacked all over the couch and dining room table, toys are strewn all over the place and drive-thru takeout on the dinner table it’s because there’s only so many hours in the day. And why do you care if you don’t live there? Gah!

I grew up in a house where you could eat off the floors with a yard that looked professionally landscaped and a home-cooked meal on the table every night. I don’t remember hanging out with my mom or dad much. I remember my mom cleaning, yelling at my brother and I to clean our rooms and yelling at my dad for walking around the freshly-cleaned floors with his gardening shoes on. There was a lot of yelling.

My house is a cluttered mess. It’s not dirty, there’s just stuff freakin’ everywhere. The last time I did Defcon Level 1 cleaning, it took about 3 days, it lasted about a week. To MEH’s credit, he did the last spring cleaning (and did a great job), and it lasted about 2 weeks. To me, a showplace house is not worth the aggravation. We don’t entertain that often, but when we do, Defcon 1 level cleaning and organizing happens. But if you’re just dropping in, welcome to our cluttered home, we live here, get over it.

Meaghan O. Perlowski, a 32-year-old mother of three in Des Moines, said in an interview: “Spending time with my kids is my highest priority, but it’s a juggling act.” Perlowski, who has a full-time job as a pharmaceutical sales representative, said she grocery-shops and runs errands on her lunch hour and does less housework to have more time with her children. “We don’t worry much about keeping the house spotless,” she said. “It’s sometimes a mess, cluttered with school papers, backpacks and toys, but that’s OK.”

Word.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sgt. Sam, you hyper-critical blowhole. I’m so sorry we all don’t measure up to your standards. Jerk.

I think there was a point here somewhere … maybe not. Oh well.