Archive for the 'family' Category

Movie reviews, cat vomit, and fish

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Anonymous Coworker
on March 10, 2008 @ 10:36 am
in Mrs. ACW, awesome, bitches, devil cat, family and nerd stuff
. 16 Comments

1) This weekend I went over to my brother’s house so we, along with my younger brother, could work on a birthday present for my mom’s 60th. My niece had just finished watching episodes 4, 5, and half of 6 of Star Wars. I took a break from working on the present to play with her, and I was asking her to find different characters among the toys scattered on the floor, and she was able to easily find Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and Yoda without any trouble. She was babbling incessantly about Darth Vader and Chewbacca, holding them by their legs and flying them through the air, eventually tucking Darth Vader under her arm and picking up a TIE Fighter while making flying sounds. I obliged by picking up the Millennium Falcon and chasing her with it. She seemed to really be getting a kick out of the whole Star Wars thing, so I asked her, “Did you really like the Star Wars movies?” and she kind of shrugged and said, “They were okay.”

2) The good cat, Wookie, woke us up early on Daylight Savings morning by yarfing her breakfast all over my jacket. It actually cleaned up so quickly and easily that I was tempted to not throw it in the washer, until I picked it up and noticed the distinct bouquet of half-digested kibbles and cat-innards. Into the wash it went.

3) Mrs. ACW recently bought a fish for her pre-school class. After much in-fighting, wheedling, consternation, back-stabbing, and compromise, they came up with this list of names:

-Chomp
-Dolphin
-Humpback Whale
-TV
-Spongebob
-Daddy (kind of really weird)
-Rocky
-Rainbow
-Orange (The fish is blue and red)
-Troy (from high school musical, I am told)
-Mr. Fish

and her favorites,

-Mr. Nachos (a close second, and if that one dies or they get a second
fish, that’s going to be his name)

-Spider-man (The name they picked)

I hereby decree that all pets shall be henceforth and forthwith named by preschoolers.

More from the funeral home

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Anonymous Coworker
on March 4, 2008 @ 9:39 am
in bitches, family, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 23 Comments

One would hope, at this point, that the anger would have diminished somewhat, and I guess it has, but not quite as much as I would have liked, due primarily to the ineptitude of the staff at the funeral home.

On Thursday my family prepared for two 2-hour viewings of my grandfather from 3-5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. Our family was invited to show up early because my aunt was having a really hard time with the whole thing, and wanted extra time to personally spend with my grandfather without a bunch of other people around. Upon arrival at two o’clock we were happy to see that the lights in the funeral home were on. There had been some power outages in the area, so we were worried about the lights at the funeral home. Before we arrived the funeral home assured my family that they had candles placed around the room and that it would be “dim”.

While my aunt drifted over to be with my grandfather, the rest of us gathered around a television to watch a slide show I had created from old pictures that my brother had scanned in. I had used iMovie and applied a liberal usage of the Ken Burns effect, and everybody seemed pretty happy with the result. Then, at 2:10 p.m., the lights went out.

“Dim” does not begin to describe the situation. Like many funeral homes, this one did not have any windows in the actual viewing room, so our room was lit by indirect ambient light from the front doors, two battery powered emergency lights, and about 6 or 7 small candles.

At 2:30 the emergency lights went out, so all we had were candles and the ambient light. If you think funeral homes are creepy, you should try hanging out in one with all the lights out. Finally the good will of my family broke, and one of my other aunts approached the funeral director.

“The lights have been out for 20 minutes. What is you back-up plan?”
“Well, the power is out in the area, and we can’t really control that.”
“That’s not what I asked you. Do you have a back-up plan for this type of situation?”
“No.”

Having just lost her father, my aunt didn’t have the energy to fight, so she found my brothers and me. My older brother and I approached the funeral director and asked what he was going to do. It took all I had to not punch him when he said there was nothing he could do. My older brother said, “No, that is not acceptable. You need to go buy a generator and get the lights on in this room. Now.” He said he would have to ask his manager, and while he disappeared we conferred about what we would do depending on when the lights came back on. We agreed that we’d ask for $1200 if the lights weren’t back on by the end of the first viewing, $2400 if they weren’t back on by the beginning of the second viewing, and $3200 if they were still off by the end of the second viewing. The price was based on what we paid for the viewing, and then we doubled it, that way even if we only got 50% of what we asked, we’d still get a full refund. We suspected they were keeping their fingers crossed that the power would come back on and wouldn’t have to shell out for a generator.

While we were waiting they lit a friggin’ oil lamp and placed it by the casket. Aside from the horrible odor, we had nothing to worry about except for the oil lamp tipping over and setting the whole room on fire. When the oil lamp started to fade they balanced a flashlight on the same table and pointed it at my grandfather. I can’t even begin to find the words to describe how infuriated I was to see my grandfather like that. Also, please keep in mind that the rest of the room was still dark, still lit only by a few flickering candles.

Finally at 3:41 p.m. a generator was connected to lights by the casket. At least anyone who wanted to see my grandfather wouldn’t feel like they were in a third-rate haunted house. The odd thing is, though, that lights in the hallway and in the other viewing rooms were on. As far as I could tell, ours was the only room in the whole place that was still dark. I’m not sure what that was about, but it didn’t help matter to see other rooms brightly lit when ours was still dark.

At 4:23 p.m. full power was restored to the building. Our room was completely lit, and for the next 35 minutes we were able view the slide show and have conversations with our family and friends without having to use candle light or a flash light.

The way I figure it, we were without power for 143 minutes out of a possible 180 minutes, amounting to almost 80% of the time we were there. I think were entitled to at least 80% of a refund for the viewings, if not more. It’s not like we can have another viewing next week. That was it. That was the only time we had. The stress and discomfort of spending so much of that time in the dark physically manifested itself in my relatives.

I’m not quite ready to say exactly where this happened, depending on how the bill is settled, but I’ll let you know what happens. Also, to prove I shouldn’t play the lottery any time soon, my dad’s uncle died on Sunday. I wasn’t close to him at all, and am not really sure if I ever even met him, but I’m pretty sure that my dad is beyond exhausted. A sister, father-in-law, and uncle within three weeks is un-fucking-real and I’m not sure that anyone should ever have to deal with that.

How about a favor?

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Anonymous Coworker
on February 27, 2008 @ 9:11 am
in Mrs. ACW, bitches, family, jokes, suhmuhmuh bitch and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 43 Comments

I realize that for the past few days I’ve been pretty fucking pissed off. Have been… am. Whatever. I guess I’m going through the 5 stages of grief:

1. Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.”
2. Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.”
3. Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”
4. Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
5. Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.”

Let’s see… I don’t think I ever went through the denial stage. I remember getting the the phone call and thinking, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.” I’m clearly in monkey-humping lust with the anger part. In fact, I mentioned to Mrs. ACW that on Sunday when we went to get food to take to my family’s house I was thinking, “Why are all these people out shopping? Don’t they know the world should stop for me?”

I’m pretty sure the bargaining thing isn’t going to crop up for the same reason that denial didn’t: I just can’t turn off the coldly logical part of my brain. I think it’s that part of my brain that helped keep us from buying a $20,000 vault when my family was ready to throw down cash for anything and everything. I know I’ve flirted with depression over the past few days, like, “Why do my homework? Why exercise? Why care what I’m eating? Why not just drink every night?” But it hasn’t been paralyzing, and usually that same part of my brain kicks in and says, “Shut up. That’s stupid. You’re not the one who just died.”

I guess I’ll eventually get to acceptance, I mean, I know I will, but right now I’m just really fucking pissed. I almost reactively called Wayne a “fucker” in the comments yesterday until I went back and re-read his comment and realized that it was relatively positive message (if only a bit preachy). So yeah, I’ve the anger part down pat.

This is where you come in! Know any good jokes? Magic tricks? Seen something really funny/bizarre/goofy online recently? Please let me know. If there’s one thing I learned from all this it’s that the periods leading up to and immediately following funerals are in desperate need of someone who knows a good joke. Lay them on me.

I’m as tired of writing about it as you are of reading it

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Anonymous Coworker
on February 26, 2008 @ 12:19 pm
in atheism!, bitches, family, money and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 27 Comments

So yesterday I went to the funeral home with my brothers, my cousin, my mom, and all my aunts and uncles. If you know anything about funeral arrangements, you know it’s the worst parts of buying a car wrapped up with all the fun and excitement of the death of a loved one. It is every bit as sleazy, scammy, and manipulative as you would imagine it could be.*

I’m glad my brothers and I were there, because had we not been, I think my mom and her siblings could have been suckered into a whole bunch of unnecessary expenses, some of which they were suckered into regardless.

It all started when the funeral home started pressuring us into getting my grandfather embalmed. Actually, it started way before that. The death industry has managed to subtly spread the myth that not only is embalming necessary for a body to be presentable, but that it may even be required by law. In Maryland, it’s not the law. There is a stipulation that “extended viewing” would allow the funeral home to require embalming, but nowhere is “extended viewing” defined. When my family sat down to have a discussion about whether or not embalming was necessary, the misinformation was coming out of the mouths of my relatives. “If he’s not embalmed we can’t have an open casket,” or “If he’s not embalmed he’ll start to stink,” or “If he’s not embalmed we won’t be able to bury him.” From what I can tell, all of these are inaccurate. Embalming is expensive ($1600 in our case), unnecessary where cold storage is available, unnatural, and bad for the environment. Does anyone has experience with a viewing and an non-embalmed body? I’d love to hear it.

The next big ticket item that can be ignored, one that we managed to keep our family from purchasing unnecessarily, is a vault. In Maryland a vault is not required, but a graveliner is (I think). A graveliner essentially keeps the ground from collapsing as the coffin degrades, and it keeps some moisture out of the grave, as well as keeping any degrading material of the body or the coffin out of the ground. It’s essentially a box in the ground that the coffin goes into. A vault is a box that goes inside the graveliner, and then the coffin goes in the vault. They start at about $3000 bucks for plain concrete and then go as high as $20,000 for fancy stuff with copper or bronze linings and embellishments. They try and sell you on the vault by saying that without it “weather” could get into the coffin sooner, essentially forcing you to visualize the deceased rotting in the ground. In our case it would have been an especially bad decision to buy a vault because our grandfather won’t even be buried with us at the graveside. The cemetery only does burials once or twice a month, and all the bodies delivered to the cemetery before that day are buried then, no visitors allowed. We wouldn’t have ever seen the vault even if we purchased it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if numerous families had purchased vaults, only for that money to go into the pockets of funeral salesmen. Don’t let a funeral director tell you that a vault is required unless you’ve read the law and know he’s right. In Maryland, he wouldn’t be.

Eventually we got to the coffins themselves, and that was a horrible process in and of itself. They try to sell you on all this fancy, polished, filigreed nonsense, when all you want is something simple and respectful. My older brother asked for a book of cheaper options once we reached the end of the first book and the cheapest option was $3000. We were told that the book we were looking at was the only book available. Then my mom told a story about when my grandfather was making arrangements for his sister and the funeral director then told him that the option he had picked for his sister was “nice”. “No,” he barked in reply, “Not nice. A necessity.” After that story the funeral director magically found a book of cheaper options. My family eventually settled on something for about $1,400 that looked remarkably like a similar option available for $700, but my mom and her siblings took a vote and opted for the more expensive one. I’m still not sure why. It’s not like you can go to a funeral and remember what the casket looked like, or that you could (or even should) look at a casket and guess how much it cost. Just build me one out of plywood. It’ll be good enough.

But that’s the thing about coffins, everybody wants to think that with a nice enough vault, graveliner, and coffin, the body will stay perfect forever. In fact, the funeral director kept talking about how some coffins had gaskets and how others did not. He was really pushing the gasket thing pretty hard, I think for the same reason as the vault: to scare people into thinking of their loved one decomposing. Well guess what? We all decompose. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. You’re going to be rotting in the ground regardless, and all this bullshit they try and sell you does nothing but prevent the former husk of your loved one from doing what it does naturally. You’ll never see them like that, so why do you even give a fuck? Are you concerned that they’ll check out the digs you bought for them if they come back in spirit form? Why the fuck would they do that? They could haunt themselves up season tickets for the Ravens and the Orioles. They could haunt themselves up a nice little spot in a strip club. They could haunt themselves up a seat in a movie theater. Why would they want to bother seeing the nonsensical shit you bought for them? They are dead! It doesn’t matter what they liked, or what they hated. They’ll never see any of it.

Finally we came to all the small details nonsense that still managed to cost an arm and a leg. A bouquet to go on top of the coffin? $200. A book for people to sign with their name and address? $40. Prayer cards? $80 for 200. And while I’m on the topic of prayer cards, what the hell are they all about? They’re like funeral trading cards. I really don’t understand why people take these things, and I REALLY don’t understand why they take 3 or 4 at a time. It’s just a card with a name, two dates, and a prayer on it. You can make your own for free, AND you can pick your own prayer! I tried to push for only getting 100, but my uncle insisted we get at least 200. I’m glad they only went that high. I can just imagine a box of 500.

My grandmother is still learning of the loss of her husband, hundreds of times every day. Fuck anyone who would dare spin that into a good thing. Comments are back on.

*Here’s Penn and Teller’s evaluation of the death industry on Bullshit. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

When it rains it pours

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Anonymous Coworker
on February 25, 2008 @ 8:07 am
in atheism!, bitches, family and suhmuhmuh bitch
. Closed

So after my dad’s family buried his sister on Friday, my mom loses her dad this past Sunday. It’s like being a rat in a fucked up experiment where I can propose hypotheses about mourning the loss of someone close and then experience it first hand. It really really sucks, and it hurts a lot.

The worst part about it is my grandmother. She has Alzheimer’s so each of my family members had to take turns consoling her as she learned of the loss of my grandfather. After the first dozen or so times I heard her learn the news I couldn’t take it anymore, so I went downstairs with the rest of my family. Eventually, no one else could take it either, so they got her to leave his body (he died in his sleep) and move down into the kitchen. It was okay for a while, but then she started asking why so many people were at her house, and we’d have to tell her again.

I try not to intentionally antagonize religion when I write, but I’m having some trouble resisting this morning. I stopped believing in deities and all that go along with them a long time ago, but I don’t let it bother me when others suppose about the existence of a supreme being. However, I find it difficult to swallow the argument that a loving god could exist and simultaneously allow a woman who had never done anything wrong to anyone to freshly mourn the loss of her husband of 62 years every 5 minutes or so. Can you even imagine the pain of looking around for your significant other and learning that they had died? Can you imagine having to go through that for the rest of your life, every moment spent in pain and loss and grief? Like I said, I don’t believe, and I think this is going to make it harder for me to listen to those who insist that something that loves us is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.
And don’t give me any of that “mysterious ways” bullshit, because it’s a cop out. This woman is going through Hell.

Anyway, I was asked to write the obituary, so I just wanted to get that out of my system lest it end up in the newspaper.

I especially hate those ones with embroidered crests

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Anonymous Coworker
on February 19, 2008 @ 9:59 am
in Glen Burnie, family, people are idiots and work
. 12 Comments

Due to a conspiracy in coincidence, it looks like I’ll be spending the rest of this week in a suit. Which sucks because I hate wearing a suit, but even worse, because I only have two suits, and they’re probably going to be pretty nasty after 4 days of continuous use.

Today I have an event for work that has me in a suit, tomorrow I have another work event that calls for the old suit and tie, then on Thursday I’m going down to Annapolis to argue about my tax assessment for my house and afterwards have to head to the viewing for my aunt, and Friday is the funeral. I’m hoping that my suit isn’t walking around by itself by then.

I guess if one of the suits gets a bit too ripe I can try and stuff myself into a third suit that I own that’s grown just a bit too small. Though I’m not sure what day would be best to be stuffed into the cotton/poly sausage-casing, since all of them require a full day of being in the suit. Sure, if I was just hanging around Glen Burnie I could wear the jacket, shirt, and tie like normal, and just put on some sweatpants and tennis shoes on the bottom.

You think I’m kidding, but that’s how you can tell when someone is about to get married around here. The groomsmen wear suit tops and pajama bottoms, and the bride has had tulle stapled to her nicest oversized t-shirt. It’s like a white trash pageant and I have a front row seat.

I’ve always hated wearing ties, and by extension really hated wearing suits, ever since I was forced to wear a tie in high school. I think I’ve blogged about it before, but for my entire freshman and sophomore year I wore the same tie every day. And for my entire junior year, I wore a different tie than the first two years, but I also wore it every day for the entire year. By the time senior year rolled around I had a horrible bitch of a girlfriend, but she had bought me a few more ties, so I was able to at least wear a different tie every day. I also came into some hideously ugly hand-me-down ties that I delighted in wearing to freak out the pretty-boys who wouldn’t be caught dead in anything less than Tommy Hilfiger.

But worse than all of that, I hate wearing blazers or sport coats. I fucking hate them. It makes me feel like a child molester dressed me. I realize that not everybody has a need to wear a suit on a semi-regular basis like I do, and I realize that the blazer is the perfect answer for them, but for me, it’s my least favorite piece of clothing. I’d rather be stuck in a suit, or even a tux all day, rather than having to wear a goddamned blazer. I hate everything about them. I hate the stupid gold buttons. I hate feel of the material. I hate how they never seem to fit right, no matter how much they cost, or even if they’ve been tailored. They make me feel like I should be growing a porno mustache and selling used Trans Ams in the parking lot of an abandoned fast food restaurant.

I really don’t give a shit about what people think of me, or how they think I dress. If they don’t like the fact that I’m wearing corduroys, an old tshirt, an old hoodie, and wool clogs, that’s awesome, because they can go shove a badger up their asses. However, when I get dressed up, I want to feel good about the way I look. I still don’t give a shit about anyone else, but I’ll be damned if when I dress up I don’t go all the way. It’s important to me to not half-ass the way I look in a suit. I’ll be a donkey in Tijuana before you catch me in fucking blazer.

The death post

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on February 18, 2008 @ 9:52 am
in atheism!, beer, family, nostalgia, potty humor and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 38 Comments

It’s been a bad morning.

At some point last night I decided it would be an AWESOME idea to have a big, fat Screwdriver at 11:30. Sure, I’d started with some scotch at 6:30, then moved on to red wine, then on to a porter, then on to white wine, then back to red wine, then back to porter. It was at that point that I should have stopped, but my stupid drunk brain was like, “Dude. Dude. You know what would be awesome right now? A screwdriver! Yeah! Dude, it’s like, healthy ’cause it’s orange juice. Yeah, we should totally have one. Dude. Have I ever steered you wrong? Yeah. Awesome.”

And so there I was on the couch, screwdriver in one hand, remote in the other, barely able to focus on Ace of Cakes.

It should have come as no surprise to me that I had chest melting heartburn a few hours later, but upon waking I was like, “How on earth could THIS have happened?”

Nearly 8 hours later and the heartburn still isn’t completely gone, and I’ve got, as Angy Hangy put it so succinctly in a somewhat related email from last Friday, “liquid Drano” in my guts. I already dominated the bathroom in my house so thoroughly that when Sherlock poked his head through the door he immediately turned around and walked out. Before this morning I would have sworn that it was impossible for cats to gag.

Anyway, as I’m trying to pull my stupid, hungover ass together this morning, I got a call from my dad that my aunt had just died. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago, and the cancer was extremely aggressive, so it’s kind of good to know that she’s not in pain anymore.

I know I deal with death differently than other people, and my aunt is no exception. It’s hard to say right now if I feel sad. I feel bad for my dad, of course, as well as my other aunts and uncles, my cousins, and their kids. I know they’re really upset. And I feel bad for my Grandmother, because it’s got to be painful to lose a child. But I’m really hard pressed to describe my emotions as sad. I’m contemplative, somber, and pensive, and I sympathize with my relatives, but I’m not sad. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been sad to hear about someone dying. I always express my condolences, because I know death can really tear other people apart inside, but sadness eludes me.

I’ve never had someone extremely close to me die, like my brothers, parents, or my wife. But even when I was a little kid and my grandfather died, I kind of just accepted it. And I think about people that have died, and I miss them, of course, but my mind never dwells on it. It’s kind of like, “Oh, I miss the way he used to joke about how we had three kinds of stuffing at Thanksgiving.” And then my thoughts move on.

I speculate that part of my lack of reaction is because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I’ve accepted death as an inevitability, so the deaths of others, or thinking about my own death, don’t cause me discomfort. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want my loved ones to die, but there’s nothing I can really do about it, so there’s no point in worrying over it.

I’m interested in having a frank discussion about death in the comments if anyone else is interested. How do you react to death or loss? Do you believe in the afterlife? If so or if not, does this comfort you? I hope it goes without saying that today most necrophilia jokes won’t be tolerated, but humor is always welcome.

Happy Birthday J-Shizzle! Lap dances all around!

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on December 25, 2007 @ 8:00 am
in Mrs. ACW, awesome, devil cat, family, jesus is fo' shizzle, money, nog and sex
. 11 Comments

May your belly be full of nog, your day be full of cheer, and your wallet be full of singles for stuffing into g-strings and banana-hammocks.

Merry Christmas from ACW, Mrs. ACW, Wookie, and Sherlock

fully nogged

Worst pizza ever

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on November 20, 2007 @ 9:40 am
in Mrs. ACW, family and food
. 20 Comments

If you haven’t gathered from prior posts, my family is pretty much completely bonkers. They’re great, and I love them, don’t get me wrong, but like many people, when I turn and objectively look at my family like an outsider might, all I see is balls-outside-of-pants crazy.

For example, my family (and by “family” I mean my dad, mom, her parents, and her six brothers and sisters, their spouses, and their children (my 12 or 14 or 16 cousins or whatever), as well as the 3 or 4 great-grandchildren) is rabidly insistent on getting together. Memorial Day, Labor Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. These all require an event that commands no less than the total attendance of the entire extended family. Days like St. Patrick’s and Valentines have fallen by the wayside now that almost all of the cousins have gotten old enough to drink and bone their significant others. But every other holiday requires compulsory attendance. I guess we could opt to just not go to some of these events, but then you have hear about it until the next year. If I missed Thanksgiving, I’d be hounded about it until the next Thanksgiving. It’s ridiculous. In fact, the craziest part is that my relatives are only interested in having everyone in the same house. Once we’re all there most of them could really give a shit about the other people in the room. It’s really bizarre.

So now it should come as no surprise to you to learn that my nuclear family celebrates a pre-Thanksgiving every year on the weekend before Thanksgiving at my mother’s behest. This is a relatively new tradition, started once we were all old enough to drive and were invited to Thanksgivings of friends and girlfriends. Because my mother wouldn’t be able to see us ALL DAY on Thanksgiving, she had to get her extra time in with a pre-Thanksgiving. So now the three sons, wives in tow, dutifully participate in pre-Thanksgiving with my parents. My grandparents are usually there too, because: hey, why not?

We have this miniature Thanksgiving with all the same traditions, but with a much smaller crowd, and a much more skewed age distribution. There are six people between 25 and 30, four people between 59 and 90, and one person below 3. And of course we have to keep the 2-year-old entertained because she’s the only one that needs entertaining. Everyone else is not giving a shit that anyone else is there.

And we finally come to why I started writing this post in the first place. Saturday night found me sitting under a circular card table set up in the living room for four unlucky people to be exiled during dinner, playing “dishes” with my niece. “Dishes” primarily consists of taking all the play dishes in the “dishes” bag and dumping those play dishes all over the floor, refilling the bag, and repeating. I wasn’t going to have any of that bullshit, especially not from someone much smaller and stupider than me, so I used my superior intellect to convince my niece that we should be making food. We took cups, plates, and bowls of imaginary ingredients and dumped them into a tin, shook the empty tin, and then my niece delivered the “food” to someone else in the room.

The process wasn’t without problems though. When we were making pizza and I was dumping in the flour, oil, water, sauce, and cheese, I asked my niece what she wanted on the pizza.

“Cookies.”

Despite this being a repulsive and disgusting pizza topping, I obliged, “Okay, we’ll have cookie pizza. What else do you want?”

“Cookes.”

“Right. Yes. There are cookies on the pizza. What other toppings should we add?”

“Pizza.”

“(sigh) I’m pretty sure that you’re not quite clear on the concept here, so I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Any other normal toppings?”

“Juice.”

“No. We’re not putting juice on pizza. That’s gross. And messy. We’ll just have your terrible cookie pizza with extra cookies.”

“Pizza!”

“Right, yes, pizza. If you can even call it that anymore.”

I sent my niece off to deliver the cookie pizza to some oblivious guinea pig who’d have to ingest the unpalatable slop. Moments later she returned, empty tin held out in her tiny hands. “More.”

I decided pizza was out of the question because of how badly she ruined it last time, so I suggested we make cookies instead. It seemed like that’s what she wanted to make anyway. I dutifully went about adding the imaginary flour, sugar, water, eggs, crisco, and chocolate chips. She had, in the meantime, found a small truck and was pushing it around my kitchen, basically violating every health department restriction in the process. Then she told me the truck wanted to watch what we were doing. She’s clearly insane, and now I had her stuck in my kitchen. What a nightmare. I put my attention back to my cookies lest she suggest that the truck needed to empty it’s diesel bladder into my gastronomic opus when I heard the voice of one of her parents, outside the confines of the tiny kitchen under the table.

“Are you making cookies down there?”

I looked at my niece, who was now pushing her truck through a flan I had set aside for dessert, turned my head toward the voice and said, “She’s not doing a goddamned thing! I’m doing all the work down here!”

They laughed, oh how they laughed, but I was the one laughing when I put the flan in the empty tin and sent it out to be eaten, delivered by a tiny malevolent sadist.

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