Tuesday, March 25, 2014

On Toy Traps, High Heels, and The Nature of The Universe

I haven't been blogging much but to offer you a small sliver, a morsel short but sweet, of entertainment, here's a comment I made on Chuck Wendig's blog. He wrote a list of things you should know about life with toddlers which was dead on, really. One of the things he mentioned was "toy traps," e.g. stepping on a Duplo block in the dark. My response:

True about the toy traps. But take comfort, gentle host, in that while if your son wants to play with dolls that's totally cool, it is unlikely that anyone will give him any Barbie dolls. I say that not because boys shouldn't have Barbie dolls, but rather because NO ONE SHOULD HAVE BARBIE DOLLS. Not just because in most of her incarnations she is a mindless dweeb, but because of the...

Shoes.

Oh, God, the shoes. The tiny little shoes which, if ninjas were real, would feature prominently in their arsenals. Duplos? Legos? I laugh. Ha, ha, I laugh. I have three sisters, one of whom was into Barbies and the other two of whom were actual Barbie addicts, if you removed their stash and didn't allow the plastic to leach into their skin for more than eight hours they were cursing and puking all over the place, you feel me? And every Barbie doll comes with at least one pair of shoes and a small hidden matter-condenser that causes her to randomly create shoes on the floor in her vicinity.

And dear God in Heaven, you step on a Barbie shoe heel-up in the dark - which you will, that is the only way that quantum mechanics allows Barbie shoes to be oriented in the dark - you will wish the ninjas had merely unleashed their poisoned caltrops on your sorry soles. SWEET MOTHER OF MATTEL THAT SHIT HURTS. Especially since you are half-asleep and not expecting it (no matter how many times it happens, nobody expects the Barbie Night-Shanking.) You're just trying to get to bed without tripping on the Barbie Dream-House, Dream-Car, Dream-Kitchen, Dream-Pornoporium, or whatever else the effing grandmothers have bought that day, and a tiny little sliver of plastic hell-stuff inserts itself into your heel and heads for your circulatory system.

But that is NOT the worst part.

Oh, no.

The worst part is that when you manage to remove the thing, and toss it into the night with a vicious curse as it so richly deserves, it will immediately vanish, and the next morn, some angel-eyed little girl with adorable sleep-tousled hair will say, "Where's Barbie's other shoe?"

"There are fourteen thousand, six hundred and ninety-eight Barbie shoes in that bin over there, conveniently sorted by color and lethality."

"No, her other blue shoe. I want her to wear these shoes."

"I don't kn..."

"FIND ME BARBIE'S OTHER SHOE OR I WILL TELL MOM YOU TOOK IT AND THEN I WILL CONSUME YOUR SOUL, PUNY MORTAL."

And since the things have quantum-filament heels that don't cause much bleeding - or perhaps just directly leeches your blood into another, even darker dimension - you can't even use a blood trail to find it but you must spend an hour uprooting the family room trying to find the shoe which tried to kill you the night before, and you learn what the phrase "adding insult to injury" really means.

So. As I said. Be grateful.