Entries

Carrots

I was in line at a waterpark, waiting to go down the waterslide and I overheard two teenage girls talking (then frantically had to repeate the words in my head for the next forty minutes, since I didn’t have my notebook with me).

Sadia No! No, get away from me. Don’t touch me. I can’t believe you’re going out with a guy so ugly.

Parveen Look, are there any hot guys at our school?

Sadia …no.

Parveen Well, okay, then.

Sadia You don’t, you can’t COMPROMISE!

I love to play backgammon and card games, but I don’t care if I win. I really am one of those people who believes that “it isn’t about whether you win or lose, it’s about having fun”. Of course, I have more fun playing if I do care about winning – I tend to pay more attention, for one thing, and in order to care about winning I need a carrot on a stick to urge me on.

For awhile, Todd and I were playing backgammon, quietly, for money. We’d put so much on each game, add it up over the course of a week, and then go out on a Saturday and blow it all on something sweet like a hat with a bell, a blue parakeet, whistles to blow as we dance down the street – and then we realized that having massive amounts of fun gambling with each other six hours a week was probably not the best example for an impressionable seven year old, and we sat down to think about a different carrot.

And we found one: household chores.

Now, we’ve always been quite good at dividing up the chores. Todd cooks, I clean the kitchen. I clean the catboxes, Todd vaccuums. But chores like “mop the bathroom floor” or “take down all the recycling” were done by whoever got to them in the ten minutes before guests arrived, leaving our house such a pit that a friend came over and sort of stood next to the dining room table for awhile holding her sandwich, and then finally said, “Um…can I have a cloth to wipe it with?” because it was covered in clay, and dried up rice and a smear of something…green.

But now that weekend gin game begins with each of us putting up a chore – wipe down the kitchen cabinets, or sweep the bedrooms – we are amazed at how easy each job is when you’ve just done it the week before. There is no longer enough cat hair floating around the living room to form an entirely new kitten. And of course we’d be perfectly happy if Paul ends up playing gin for chores with his partner when he’s in his thirties.

Anyway. It was fairly late in the day, and Todd and I were playing cards. Paul came up and asked if we could make popcorn. Since Todd and I were both tired, I said, “Play for who makes popcorn?” and Todd nodded. We were playing a fast, hard game, both of us concentrating hard, when Paul came up to see how it was going, and said, “Yay! The winner gets to make popcorn with me!” and we both felt so bad that we scrapped the game and both went into the kitchen to make popcorn as a family.

Kale

I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue.