Junk

Once upon a time, in a barn far, far away, two small children longed for sugar. One child dug deep, deep into the cupboards and thought he'd hit pay dirt. In his euphoria he read "chocolate" on the label and took a big bite of the bar. Even if he had read the word "baker's" before it, he would not have known what it meant in time to stop him from a mouthful of horror. The second child climbed atop the fridge every day to get to her stash: a gigantic jar of quarter-sized chewable vitamin C. She grew healthy and tall -- after a brief period of portliness prior to excessive growth.

When you live 30 minutes from civilization and your parents are on a freak-'70s, nuts-and-twigs diet, you don't get a lot of normal childhood treats lying around. Apparently, in this phase of deprivation, even my parents became desperate.

If necessity is the mother of all inventions, my mother was the inventor of all things necessary. Rummaging around, she found the heretofore secret ingredients for Junk. Asking for measurements would be insulting. And futile, as there aren't any.

In this order melt together in small frying pan: butter, marshmallows, some form of chocolate (chips, powder, Nestle Quik in dire cases), peanut butter and a crunchy item (cereal, chow mein noodles). In true tradition, Junk must be eaten from the pan, on the couch, kitchen towel used to keep lap from burning. Junk must be eaten so hot that you burn your mouth on the first bite and can't really taste anything after that, with a glass of milk. Top tip: don't use metal or wood utensils as Junk sticks to them.

As you can guess, I just made some.

Let me know how it goes!

Open House!

I cannot explain why the big cemetery we drive by all the time has two massive signs attached to the iron gate that say: Open House, Sunday: 9am-4pm.

My money bank!!

The other day I gathered all Cam's change, grabbed his bank details, and marched Cam down to the car for a big, educational trip to the bank. Cam's bank has a coin counter, and it's also in the same parking lot as our grocery store, both of which were meant to be all shades of convenient. And then I realized it was Sunday. Bah!

But alas, I still had to get food. I pulled into the lot, mentally preparing myself for what awaited me -- wrestling Cam into the cart, ready for the fits of "ICE CEAM, ICE CEAM" and other general mayhem like pretending to parent properly in front of strangers when what I really want to do is a) leave him in the car or b) squeeze him a little harder than child services allows to stop whatever behavior -- and lo and behold, there was life in his bank.

America really is the best country on Earth. Bank hours on a Sunday. Eleven to four. And the place was packed.

The convenience of America never ceases to amaze me. Probably because while living in Germany my work hours were the same as grocery-store hours, things closed around noon on a Saturday --when I woke up -- until 10am on Monday, when I went to work. It was pretty dire, but man I was thin. I regularly ate cucumber for dinner. Or eggplant, or stale crackers, or whatever single item that one would leave to the very end in a fridge. That could then be covered in balsamic vinegar. I balanced out the starvation with beer for calories.

Back to beautiful Sunday bank hours, not only did we win a prize for guessing within $1.99 of what we put in the coin counter, but Cam is obsessed with the bank now. He didn't say a word until later that night, when he pipes up with, "Money! Money bank! My money bank! Where'd go? My money? Go, go bank!" for nearly an hour, and several times this week. Awesome.

The Classics

I was chatting away on the train the other day with two moms and their teen daughters. They were headed to the big city from New Jersey to see a Broadway show, which they did several times a year, and yet they were totally lost. Keep in mind they did this trip often, and it's a three-track system that has twelve total stops. Mass transitly speaking, not complicated.

They were going to see The Little Mermaid before it went the way of a lot of shows these days -- bust.

The last show we saw was Mary Poppins. Totally brilliant, think it's the best show we've ever seen, and that was before we met one of the Marys who lives in our building. Catherine, she's adorable.

One of the teens says she's never seen Mary Poppins the movie and never will, as it's, like, five hours long. The mom assures her it's about an hour and a half. The girl says, no, on TV it's like five hours. We assure her that's because of the commercials.

The other teen says, I want to buy, like, all the Disney movies on DVD. The other teen says, yeah, like, the classics: Lion King, Aladdin.

Were I the type of person who enjoys pages of literary masterfulness, I'd make some tidy metaphor about the train, its track, my "train" of thought of what the classics are and things screeching, derailing and what not. But I skip those bits when reading and go directly to the dialogue mainly because I've read too many books and no longer care. In fact, the last book that actually made me read the descriptive bits was The God of Small Things. Feel free to judge.

But if you think about it, how do you define a classic movie? Off the top of my head, it would be something award-winning, seen by millions, instantly recognizable either by character, actor, song...made before you were born.

Lion King won two Oscars and 22 other awards. Two words: Hakuna Matada. It's a wildly successful show. It was made in 1994. These girls were born between then and 1996, I'd guess.

Dear god.

I felt really old. Old like their mothers, who were in their mid-40s, when in my mind, I see myself as being closer in age to, like, the teens. A great lady in her 60s I used to know said the best 10 minutes of her day was between waking up and looking in the mirror. In bed she saw herself in her prime. Twenty, thirty. And in the 10 steps to the mirror she aged forty years. Now if that's not incentive to stay in bed.

I've started reminiscing about my classic self. The one that not only entered but won dance offs and volleyball tournaments. Instantly recognized and remembered by many by Pink's song Get The Party Started. One word: Mafibicka. More words: what country am I in?

The thing with classics though, is that while we think fondly of them, years on you take a closer look and the special effects aren't that great (think Star Wars). The jokes and dialogue don't seem as funny as you remembered (think Coming to America). The scenes seem a bit choppy and the Definition isn’t so High.

Don't get me wrong, I'd watch The Princess Bride several hundred more times, but in the end I'm more interested in the coming attractions than something I’ve seen before.