Driving Miss Crazy

I start my day by driving my daughter into the high school. Why doesn’t she take the bus, you ask? Because I made the grave mistake last year of driving my kids to school once and in the Language of Teenagers, that translated to: I never have to ride the bus again.

This morning drive is sometimes the worst part of my day. Driving to the high school between 7:12 and 7:29 is just about the biggest pain in the ass and trumps all other annoyances, including running out of gas, bouncing a check, and misplacing your cell phone when it’s on vibrate.

This school drop-off is misery on wheels for several reasons.

1. Our high school was designed by people who got to remedial engineering class via the short bus.

Our high school has a side entrance, which my daughter has to use because it leads to the band room and she has to put her bassoon in there first thing in the morning. The bassoon case is large and heavy, and if she has anything more than a short walk from the car to her band locker, she will have even worse scoliosis, neck pain and TMJ than she already has and I would officially be The Mother From Wife Swap Who is Selfish and Doesn’t Do Anything For Her Kids.

This side entrance is approximately 50 yards from the front entrance, just a little hop, skip and a giant step from the elaborate, gated, fortressed area where the non-band kids and piccolo players can get to school.

But in their infinite wisdom, the designers of this school did not link those two doorways with a road. There literally is no way to get from the front entrance to the side entrance by car. Literally. “You can’t get there from here.”

Instead you have to drive out the front entrance and make a series of right turns, all on main roads, which is a 2.3-mile drive. There are no shortcuts through neighborhoods, even though you pass entire zip codes as you drive. And the whole time you’re picturing your daughter walking the 50-yard pedestrian walkway and thinking not very maternal thoughts.

The most major road you have to hit on this journey brings me to #2.

2. People on Indiantown Road at 7:12-7:29 a.m. are the devil incarnate, not to mention mean and selfish.

So you’re pulling onto a busy road and there’s a stream of traffic and the Guatemalans are trying to cross in front of you on their bikes and there are some kids who are walking to school (presumably whose mothers are The Mother From Wife Swap) who are trying to cross the street and there’s a light but you have to turn right on red or you’ll never get to the school by 7:29 and you finally make the turn and you’re on Indiantown, and you’re in the line that’s creeping forward to pull into the last street you must encounter before you get to the school, and you’re pretty happy that you did it without injuring anyone, and then that jackass with the Confederate flag on the back of his white pick-up truck slips right in front of you, causing you to slam on your brakes.

I hate that kid. I know I’m an adult and I’m not supposed to hate minors, but I hate that kid. First, he drives a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag on the back. Because he regularly cuts in front of me, I am right behind him as we enter the school parking lot, so I like to look at the face of the African-American parking lot patrol as this racial-slur-on-wheels pulls in. His face is expressionless and serene, but I hope he’s plotting some kind of revenge. One can only hope.

And flag boy drives like a maniac. He’s too busy and important to wait in the line to turn in, like the rest of us, so he just speeds up until he finds an opening right before the turn, and it’s often in front of me, because I refuse to bumper-hug the car in front of me, because I’m just not a mean-spirited person. I will key his truck though, someday if the parking lot patrol guy doesn’t take some kind of action soon.

3. My car is totally quiet, which exacerbates the problem of high school kids walking in front of moving vehicles.

High school kids are nitwits. I love them to death, but I could also take them and knock their heads together, if someone would invent a way to do that with 120 kids at a time.

After the extra drive to the side entrance, dealing with young David Duke, and finally getting into the parking lot, I’ve got to watch out for kids walking in unpredictable zigzags where the cars are supposed to go, which they do with wild abandon. They don’t even look to see if a car is coming. I’ve almost hit a couple of them, and unfortunately none of them are the driver of the white pick-up. [Did I just say that out loud? I didn’t mean that. I will never hurt a hair on that kid’s head. If anything happens to him, I had nothing to do with it. I would look hard at the parking lot patrol guy.]

When I’m driving really slow, my car engine takes a sabbatical, so I can sneak up on people. Not that I want to sneak up on these kids walking randomly through the parking lot. I want them to know I’m there so they’ll move. What am I saying? Even when they see me, they don’t move.

4. I have to do this into next year because my daughter won’t get her license in time to get one of the coveted parking spots and drive herself.

Unless an unfortunate accident happens to the white pick-up truck while it’s parked in the lot and that kid has to bum a ride and his spot opens up. Did I say that out loud?

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Knock Knock. Who's There? Not Funny Traffic School

I’m not a super cynic, but I often can spot a scam when I see one. I don’t believe that I’ll get a free computer if I send 20 emails to my friends, I don’t think the world will end in 2012 (but thank you, Jack van Impe and Roxella, thank you very much for your efforts), and I don’t believe in the Dislike button on Facebook.

Which is why I surprised myself when I fell for the old ‘comedy club traffic school’ scam.

I recently got a speeding ticket and had to go to go to traffic school to get the points taken off of my permanent record. I figured it was relatively inexpensive and my time is really not worth squat, so it seemed like the right thing to do. About a week after I sent in my ticket with the box marked “I intend to attend traffic school,” I suddenly started to get a plethora of mail from lawyers and traffic schools.

The first day there were five postcards for traffic schools and one letter from a lawyer. I am not wealthy, connected, or bad-ass enough to warrant communication with an attorney, so I nervously held my breath as I opened the first letter.  I relaxed a little bit when I read, “Dear Sir/Ma’am,” and then continued to read about how this particular lawyer had “chosen not to develop a slick marketing leaflet, but rather to send you this simple explanatory letter detailing my services.”  (The services included a GUARANTEE that I would not be found guilty.)

The next day I received another half dozen traffic school postcards, four more letters from lawyers, and some slick marketing leaflets, as predicted by the first lawyer. One law firm’s letter included a $5 off coupon. Many included key Spanish words like “No Se Demore!” Some had clever phone numbers like 1-800-CITATION. After a week, they were sleazing up my mailbox, even the ones with the photos of the dark suits standing in front of that shelf full of scholarly books. (I suspect the books were hollow and the lawyers were not wearing pants, below the camera view.) I couldn’t toss them into recycling fast enough - no demore!

The traffic schools were even worse. I was having a hard time believing that the state of Florida, the county of Palm Beach, and Pam, my car insurance agent, would recognize them as legit. They all had little cartoon mascots and big bubble fonts, obviously desperate to get my attention.  One said, “Why read? Choose our 100% online audio course!” I’m not sure I wanted to be on the same list as people who weren’t willing to read words in order to clear their driving records.

I picked The Improv - you know, the comedy club chain? Yeah, well, the stand-up comedy business must suck, because they’re now offering traffic school. Their ad promised to make me laugh while I melted away all three of my points.

It was an online course (dammit - I was hoping for a two-drink minimum and a nightclub atmosphere while I took the class. I made up for it by putting on lipstick, dimming the lights, letting a cigarette burn nearby, and drinking two glasses of wine.) I paid the fee and started in on Unit 1 and very soon realized that The Improv Traffic School is not funny. Not even a little bit.

They took a stab at it by inserting comic strips at the end of each section. Most of them star this Fabio-like superhero who flies around delivering physical brutality and clever plays-on-words to drivers who follow too closely or coast through stop signs.

Maybe when they said it was going to be funny, they didn’t mean ha-ha funny, but weird funny. As in, “Isn’t it funny that I haven’t as much as smiled while attending this Improv Traffic School . . .”

Here’s an example of the Improv’s idea of traffic humor: When warning against drinking and driving, this is added as an aside: “. . . Not to mention that you can end up going home with a person who looked like a ‘super model’ and then miraculously transformed into a troll.”

The Improv Traffic School slays me.

Here’s another cricket inducer: “Florida drivers ranked 28th, with an average score of 78.6. Way to go Florida. But then again if you knew the remaining 21.4% of traffic laws, you wouldn't be here. Or was it just bad attitude? Just kidding. Let's take a closer look at this test . . .”

I did laugh out loud once. In a section on how to prepare for a car crash, we were advised to clean all the junk out of our cars. “If a pen can go through the front windshield, it will go through your head.”

I don’t know why, but that just struck me as pretty funny.  Maybe it was the two drink minimum.

Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be here all week.

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Ho Ho Ho! Merry Early November!

I really hate to be the old crabby lady that I appear to be to my kids, but I’m going to have to mention the fact that Santa is at our mall already. I realize that complaining about how early Christmas starts is part of the maturing process that turns a borderline-hip 50-something into Rose from The Golden Girls. I’m blaming it on the hot flashes and the fact that my husband was even more upset than me, and he’s younger.

We went to the mall together yesterday, a rare occurrence in our marriage. We’re not shopping compatible, so the only real shopping we do together is to Home Depot and that’s only because it takes two people to steer the platform dolly. In regular shopping, my husband walks too fast and because I refuse to trot, I end up walking way behind him, irritating him, especially when I decide to stop and do something crazy like go into a store to buy something. We are never in the market for the same things, so we never want to be in the same stores. It’s a mess.

Yesterday, though, we found ourselves in the midst of a freak retail shopping accident in which we were both in the same car and we both had to go to the mall. I had to shop for a baby gift and buy party invitations and my husband had visiting hours scheduled with a mac computer in the Apple store. (Someday he’ll get custody, but for now supervised visits with limited physical contact is the best that he can get.)

When we walked in through the Macy’s entrance I immediately saw no less than three giant Christmas tree-shaped piles of balls. They were red and silver, they were shiny and they were about as festive as Macy’s gets outside New York City on Black Friday. By the time we wended our way through the store and into the mall concourse, my husband was beside himself with middle-aged crankiness over the Christmas stuff being out and Christmas carols being piped throughout the store.

“Oh, look, there’s Santa’s thing,” I said before I could stop myself. The spot in the middle of the mall that is reserved for special events, like fashion shows and that famous guy that did makeovers once, had been turned into Caesar’s Palace on steroids. That’s how I knew it was Santa’s spot. Only in America is Santa Claus given digs fit for Caligula. He has an actual throne and the whole place is a celebration of red velvet, all that is fake gold, and giant bows. (The only thing missing was a vomitorium, but there was a fountain nearby.)

Then we saw that Santa has already arrived and is holding court there. There were already kids in line. (What kid worthy of the title knows what he wants for Christmas already? They haven't even invented the stuff yet that my kids are getting.)  My husband threatened to kick Santa’s butt from here back to the North Pole. “And don’t let me see you back here until November 27,” he muttered.

Maybe if I had younger kids and had a list of rare, hard to find toys to girl-fight someone over, I would appreciate the early start. But as much as I love Christmas, I know that if I have to put up with another 41 days of Bing Crosby music in Brookstone, vases full of fake snow in Pottery Barn, and stacks of shiny red and silver balls in Macy’s, I’m likely to stage a little Black Friday of my own, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

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A Mouse in the House

My former neighbor, a girl who now lives in my mom’s house and the house where I lived from seventh grade on, told me that a mouse ran across the dining room the other day and her dad squashed it with his boot like it was a bug.

That house always had mice. In fact starting with that house and continuing with almost every house I’ve lived in, I’ve had either city mice or country mice, suburban mice or metro-vogue mice. They all ate paper and candles and scared the shit out of me.

As a result, I know more about mice, how to kill them, and some of the amazing and disgusting things they’ll do than I care to admit. Helen, my former boss, told me once that she smelled a horrible rotting smell in her kitchen that she couldn’t figure out. Finally decided to empty her pantry to get to the source. She found a bottle of soy sauce of which a mouse had chewed the plastic lid off, and crawled inside, got stuck and died.

See? That’s just one of the stories in my collection of little known and repulsive facts about the mouse lifestyle.

If you’re not interested in mice and don’t want to read the rest of this blog, leave with this one piece of advice: If you have a mouse in your house, don’t use sticky traps. Ever. I’m aware that the spring-loaded mousetrap was invented in 1894 and since then we’ve made improvements in virtually every single other area of human life, but trust me and my disgusting stories when I tell you that the old fashioned neck-breaking-metal-bar method is the best that we can do for now.

When we lived in South Jersey, we lived in front of a cornfield (aka Vegas for Mice). Shortly after we moved in, the entire field mouse community got word that they should make their way to 33 Byron Drive, because a couple of pack-rat journalists moved in and had lots of old newspapers in the basement, and a whole kitchen drawer full of birthday candles in various colors, good for hours of chewing enjoyment.

I set traps in the basement and caught a bunch of mice, but not before they had shredded some historic headline front pages that my husband and I had collected, a stash of the kids’ kindergarten drawings, and our marriage license.

But it was the mice upstairs, in the kitchen, that really skeeved me out. Unlike Helen, I found very few in the food cupboards, but lots of them in the birthday candle drawer and oddly in the dishtowel-and-pot holder drawer. (Were they cold? Were they looking for blankies?)

For a while I experimented with different kinds of traps. The thought of breaking their little necks bothered me, so I got a couple of sticky traps, those yellow rectangles of death, which are covered with absolutely the stickiest substance on the planet.  (Note: If after reading this you still feel you should try these traps, do not – I repeat do not under any circumstance – test them out by putting your finger directly onto the sticky substance. It causes more problems than getting your finger snapped in a regular mousetrap.) I set the first trap in the dishtowel-pot holder drawer in the kitchen.

The next morning I opened the drawer to find the answer to my question How Does This Sticky Trap Kill the Mice?  The answer is: The trap doesn’t kill them. They either have heart attacks from the stress or they kill themselves by trying to chew off the body part that is stuck to the trap, in this case the entire lower half of the mouse. By the evidence, I can also assume that there is a lot of thrashing and throwing of limbs involved, as well as some stomach upset and loss of bowel and bladder function. The ensuing mess was enough to make me want to move away and start over with all new stuff. In actuality I had to start over with all new dishtowels and potholders.

I can’t explain why I set a second sticky trap, but I did, in the birthday candle drawer. The next morning I opened the drawer very, very, very slowly, afraid of what I would find. What I found was no blood. No guts. No mouse. No mousetrap.

“What do you mean there was no mousetrap?” my sister Pam asked me when I told her.

“It was gone. The whole mousetrap was gone.”

“Are you sure that one of the kids didn’t take it out?”

“Yeah, right, like they’re going to help with this. No, I set these traps late at night, after everyone’s in bed and I check on them in the morning, before anyone else is up,” I told her. “Besides, no one in our family will open drawers in the kitchen anymore.”

“What you need to do,” Pam said matter-of-factly, “is set three more sticky traps for his other three feet, because you have a mouse walking around your house wearing one big sandal.”

I couldn’t figure out how the mouse got out of the drawer wearing that thing. There had to have been a rescue by his buddies, probably involving pizza coupons, garbage bag twisties and a ball of string from the next drawer down. This was getting serious and I couldn’t let these little rodents conspire against me. So I set a third trap, back in the dishtowel-pot holder drawer, which now contained a single old rag, a token decoy.

 The next morning, I opened the drawer (I now was getting very good at opening drawers so slowly my coffee got cold in the process) and there was the mousetrap and there was the mouse. There had been no chewing and thrashing and there were no signs of a rescue attempt. But he was still alive. He was lying there on his side, all peaceful-like, his little eyes closed and his chest pumping up and down with his breath. This was bad. Very, very bad.  I wasn’t about to touch the trap, afraid that the movement would revive him and he would lash out at my finger and if I slipped and my finger ended up on the yellow sticky stuff with a living mouse . . . oh, god . . .

So I closed the drawer and stuck a Post It on the outside that said, “DO NOT OPEN. MOUSE INSIDE.” It took three days for the mouse to die, with all five of us occasionally opening the drawer to check on his progress and timing his chest movements.

That was the end of my experiment with other kinds of traps. Breaking their necks was the clear winner. So I set more neck-breaker traps in all the hot spots, including all around the basement. Then one day, the mouse grapevine must have gotten word to vacate 33 Byron Drive. Maybe the guy with the sandal finally made it back to the field to report the horrors. In any event, we never had another mouse in the house for the rest of the year.

But there would be other houses and other mice. So far, here in Florida, we don’t have mice, but the snakes and lizards are enough. I’m thinking of leaving bottles of soy sauce in every room, just in case.

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My Murder Novel and Bloody Mary's Gas Station

I am desperately trying to be a participant in NaNoWriMo, the novel-in-a-month writing project, but I’m failing miserably. Either because:

a) it’s really, really hard to write a whole novel in a month that also has meals and laundry in it,

b) I’m about as much of a novelist as I am a professional figure skater (The last time I skated, it took me 15 minutes to figure out how the laces worked and 30 seconds to twist my ankle), or

c) I have adult ADD, which makes it impossible for me to concentrate on anything for longer than it takes to write a 140-character Tweet.

While I fail at novel writing, however, I am honing my skills of procrastination and excuse making. In an effort to convince myself and God that I can’t possibly write 1,600 words a day, I’m cleaning things that have never ever before been cleaned and probably going to have my Christmas cards addressed a month in advance and in calligraphy.

Part of the problem is that the story I’m writing for my novel project is one in which a woman kills her son-in-law. I made up a good plot and some mighty fine details, to the point where if I could just get it written, it might be fun to read for somebody. But my experience with murder is limited to Law & Order Seasons 1 through two years ago. My own life is pretty boring and routine and includes no murders or even any extra skeevy sons-in-law who might deserve to be croaked.

So to set a murderous mood for myself, I’ve been trying to think of things from my past that were juicy killings with lots of good characters and super-charged adjectives. This made me remember Bloody Mary Schaffer’s gas station.

Mary Schaffer - and I’m not sure how her last name is spelled . . . This is an oral history story, back when tales of yore were passed on by word of mouth around an open fire, in the mid 1960s - Mary Schaffer was a wizened lady who ran a gas station in my home town, right near the VFW and the Red Barn. She had one gas pump and a little store and she ran it all by herself, with the help of a boy who pumped the gas. I say wizened because she was wrinkly like smokers get wrinkly, but she had super leathery, tan skin, and physically she could kick some serious ass. She wore her hair short, gray and oily, and she slicked it straight back. Needless to say there was no makeup, earrings or accessories going on up in there. Knowing what I know now, I would have guessed that she was a bull dyke, but for the fact that her story included her husband, the love of her life, who was murdered in the gas station.

Apparently, he was working alone one night and a guy came in with a gun and held up the place, then shot Mary’s husband dead. Everyone told Mary to close up the gas station and go into some other line of work, but Mary was hell bent on getting revenge. Somehow, she figured the guy was going to come back, having successfully held up this one gas station once. I don’t really agree with her on that line of thinking, but it probably kept her going. Feeding and nurturing that anger and vengeance made her one of the longest running and most successful small business owners in Hubbard (although you wouldn’t find her at the BPW meetings).

So she kept the gas station opened and rarely if ever left her spot behind the counter. She told the teen-age boys who hung out there drinking pop from the pop machine (my brother and his friends among them) that she kept a loaded gun under the counter and when the robber came back, she was going to blow his brains out. And she got the nickname Bloody Mary. As in, “Stop at Bloody Mary’s and get $2 worth of regular on your way to the Red Barn.” 

The place never again got held up, unfortunately for Mary and that itchy trigger finger of hers, but fortunately for all other gas station robbers in the greater Youngstown area. Because I don’t think Mary cared which gas station robber came back to her place. She would just as nicely as you please shoot any gas station robber, even if he was not the same race or age as the one who killed her husband.

She chatted up the teen-age boys who hung out there, but to me she was extremely scary. She never smiled or said anything when I went in for a pop or some candy, or peered out at her from the back seat of my mom’s Mustang. I wanted to see the gun pretty badly, but at the same time, did not want to be in that gas station buying a pack of Juicy Fruit when the robber came back and the gun came out from behind the counter in all its legendary glory.

I would love to sit and gather up some good murder novel material from Bloody Mary, if she’s still alive. (Which I doubt; the wrinkly skin made it hard to determine how old she was back then, but even if she was a prematurely wizened-40 then, she’d be about 80 now. The smoking and the pent-up hate surely killed her long ago.)

It’s too late for me to change my novel too much (although who am I kidding? I’ve barely started it). I have the son-in-law character down to an easily hatable low-life that I can’t give up on now. So I might try to work in a Bloody Mary character in some side plot. There’s got to be a gas station in this fictional town.

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Time to Buy the Turkey

It’s time to start planning for another Thanksgiving. I know this, because at my grocery store, the featured meat case has turkeys in it and there is an archway of artificial autumn leaves at the cigarette/lottery ticket/customer service counter. (In Florida, it’s important to pay attention to these clues since we often forget what season it is. If you see corned beef and leprechauns, it’s St. Patrick’s Day; ham and pastel bunnies, Easter. We rely on the meat-and-mascot reminders to tell us where we are on the calendar.)

Lots of my friends have been talking about what they’re going to do for Thanksgiving. It’s pretty much the same exact plan - getting together with family to eat a turkey dinner - which makes us the most predictable, boring nationality on the planet. Wouldn’t we be way cooler if we observed a tradition like tar-and-feathering someone every four years?

The only thing spicing up some of my friends’ Thanksgiving get-togethers is the dysfunctionality of their families.

I get a kick out of kooky families. Despite all the drama, yelling and broken wine glasses, they are having way more fun than the normal people. And I think they wind themselves up so much that they end up sleeping better. At least the ones who do the crying.

Mary Engelbreit can say whatever she wants, but no one person put the fun in dysfunctional, it was always there.  And it doesn’t come out with any more glory than at Thanksgiving.

From the practical joke Jacob played on his dad with the old furry arm trick, to more modern day tales of sons coming out of the closet, screwing with your own family is the only thing that distinguishes one family get-together from the next.

Because there’s nothing else to do. The whole holiday is based around a dinner of, quite frankly, not the best food the Americans can come up with. A meal of roasted turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and cranberry sauce is pretty simple and straightforward. You’d get kicked out of the gourmet dinner club if you served it. And I don’t know about you, but my family won’t let me tinker with that menu. One year I made Italian stuffing with pine nuts and parmesan cheese and my kids wished me dead and threatened to move to Canada.

So you cook that food and eat it and then you look around and you’ve gathered all these people in your house and what do you do with them?

You can’t do a jigsaw puzzle, the dining room table is in use. You can’t leave the house, it’s too cold and the women are wearing party shoes. You can watch football but eventually, one of the women will start to talk about the tight, shiny pants on the football players and all the men will leave and then what do you have? A bachelor party with no bachelor. That’s not Thanksgiving.

My own family has evolved into a pretty normal bunch of people, so I don’t have any modern day tales of wild Thanksgiving shenanigans. But in my parents’ era, there is one story that was told and retold to me for years: The year my dad kept going to the bar instead of buying the turkey.

My mom had five kids, a sense of responsibility to uphold family traditions, and no driver’s license. So she had to rely on my dad to go to Barth Farms to get the turkey for Thanksgiving. The other groceries she would get by walking to Loblaw’s in the square of Hubbard, with our wagon, plus a couple of kids to help her carry bags.

The turkey, however, was my dad’s responsibility. A few days before Thanksgiving, my mom told my dad to go buy the turkey. He took the car keys and appeared to be leaving to go get the turkey, but he in fact, went to his brother Henry’s house, picked him up and they went to the VFW and drank. He came home hours later without the turkey. My mom was probably a little steamed. She told him just for that, he had to go out the next night and get the turkey. The next night, my dad went straight to Hen’s house, picked him up and they went to the VFW. Still no turkey.

To my dad’s credit, I think he had every intention of buying the turkey. He just wanted to take along his brother for company. And for a couple of Irishmen whose own father had been - and I’m just guessing here - unable to pull off successfully picking up a turkey on his best day, he didn’t stand a chance.

The second time my mom was really mad. The Laney family legend has him doing it at least one more time, but I’m not sure about that. The important part was the result: My mom made my dad take all the kids to a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner. In the 1950s, going to a restaurant for a holiday meal meant you were either old and lonely or rich and spoiled beyond belief.

We were neither, but yet there they were, in a restaurant on Thanksgiving day. I was an infant at the time and didn’t get to go. My mom stayed home with me and together we martyred ourselves.

Since then, our Thanksgiving gatherings have been tame. We have even waded into the waters of bringing outsiders to our family dinners, without horrible results.

This year, I’m skipping Thanksgiving altogether, going to Key West for five days with my husband, daughter and mother-in-law, and none of them will care what we eat on Thursday. In fact, we can all get sloppy drunk and not piss anyone off.  I’d like to think my dad will be raising a glass to that.

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Just Call It Mess-cara

Here’s why I don’t wear a lot of makeup, why I don’t deserve to be beautiful, and why I may stop all personal hygiene practices other than showering and brushing my teeth. I put on mascara the other day for the first time in about 25 years and it scratched my cornea and caused a 48-hour sore eye.

I know most women put on mascara every single day and don’t have any problems like this, which is why I think that makeup and I are headed for a serious break-up. It just doesn’t have the respect for me that it once had. And I’m not getting much out of the relationship.

I’m blaming the whole mascara incident on CNN. Early in the morning, when I’m making coffee, I turn on Robin Meade and - oh for the love of god, if she doesn’t look like a runway model . . . what is she doing on The News? Shouldn’t she be flapping her wings on a Victoria’s Secret ad in Elle? Like it isn’t hard enough to be an average looking middle-aged woman, but first thing in the morning? It’s hard to look at the TV screen, knowing what I, myself, look like at that moment. Anyway, her eyes are stunningly dark and lash-filled. I’m not saying I went out and bought mascara because I wanted to look like Robin Meade, but I was at CVS anyway and saw a mascara on sale, and thought, “Every woman on the planet plus Adam Lambert is wearing mascara, what’s the matter with me?”

So I bought it and put it on. Within a couple of hours, I was experiencing the same eye pain that I used to have when I had hard contact lenses and wore them too long.

Sidebar: Remember hard contacts? If you wore them a few hours too long, you’d get these stabbing eye pains that the doctor called corneal abrasion but that I called an oh-my-god-it-hurts-with-my-eyes-closed-and-it-hurts-with-them-open. More than once I had to be taken to the eye doctor and treated for a scratched cornea because I either fell asleep in my contacts or didn’t wear them at all one day and then all day the next day.

Once, in college, my friend John and I drove to Indiana to visit his friend in Indianapolis and my sister Reenie in Bloomington and I wore my contacts too long on the drive back to Kent. Some time after he dropped me off at my house, John had to come back to pick me up and drive me to the ER, where they squeezed some salve into my eyes and taped two big gauze pads to both of my eyes. There was tape all over my face. I looked like Tom Cruise in Minority Report and I felt like Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Without the blood dripping down.

Another time, I flew to Owensboro, Kentucky, for a job interview, over-wore my contacts and ended up spending the night between Day 1 of the interview and Day 2 of the interview clutching a pillow and rocking back and forth on the hotel bed, off and on talking with an ER nurse on the phone. Not surprisingly Day 2 didn’t go well and I didn’t get the job.

So yeah, the mascara made my eyes look different. It made my left one red, puffy and leaking tears for two days. Plus I had to wear my glasses, which don’t make me look smart, employed and well read, despite the LensCrafters poster promises.

So I’m back to no mascara. I could be a nun for all the makeup I don’t wear, the jewelry I don’t own, and the fact that I wear the same basic outfit pretty much all the time.

I would put my efforts into my lips and start using lip liner, but I read about this lady who used a tester lipstick in a department store and got a big old lip infection that she said was “throbbing.”

Robin Meade? Who needs her.

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