HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW?

So second son was asked to the girl's choice dance coming up next month. And of course, since it's all about me, I had strong feelings about the whole thing, on account of my experience asking a kid to Sadies my Jr. year.

His name was Paul, but I like to call him assface. Don't worry, it's a scriptural reference, minus the face part. Means donkey. Anyway, I gathered up my courage, and a woman in my neighborhood willing to dress up as a witch and deliver a pumpkin. He was to return the pumpkin to me with his answer carved into it.

Now, I had done my homework, friends. I knew he hadn't been asked. And we were friends. We smiled and spoke to each other in the halls and everything. So I kind of knew what I was getting into...

...or did I?

A day went past. No answer. Another day...then a week...still no answer. Just rumblings. Rumblings that sounded something like, "Paul doesn't want to go with Lisa. He begged this other girl to hurry and ask him, so he doesn't have to go with her." Which started even more rumblings within my gut, resulting from a heart that had plunged into a belly full of acid and though not completely digested, left behind the crunchy outer shell, while fully consuming the innards made up of self esteem.

Long story short, he never answered me. Just expected I'd know. And I did. I knew from then on that Paul=assface. A.k.a. donkey. And a bunch of other knowledge regarding his parentage~the son of a something or other.

But a lesson was learned, friends, just like every time we're hit in the face with a manure cream pie. And in this case, it was about what my own children would or would not do, if asked by someone they felt less than excited about (not a commentary on son's feelings.) Because one day, the person who doesn't know how to carve a pumpkin, might be discovered on a social network, like, oh, say Facebook? And possibly, that person might have, gee, I don't know, found themselves beaten into submission with an GINORMOUS ugly stick! Plus, they might even have married the poor, stupid lass who "hurried up and asked them to the dance," only to end up divorced, unemployed and subsisting on a steady diet of government cheese while living in a van down by the river. (I might have embellished the cheese and van, but the rest is hands to the heaven.)

And you never know. Who's to say that this person might not be scanning a blog, or the local newspaper one day, and find a little tale about a girl's choice dance, written from the perspective of the NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST WITH A SUCCESSFUL MARRIAGE, BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN AND THE COMMON SENSE TO HAVE HER PICTURE PHOTO SHOPPED TO THE HILT, BUT NOT ENOUGH SO SHE CAN'T BE RECOGNIZED. And maybe, just maybe, this imaginary donkey might think twice about his decision of whether or not he could have been bothered to answer a girl with her heart on her sleeve...that fell into her stomach.

And someone who still remembers how long it took to refill that crispy heart shell with a soft, meringue center, might scream at the top of her blog lungs~ "HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW? HUH? HUH?"

That's what I thought.

'NUFF SAID.