ALIENS ABDUCT HUSBAND!

"This is not my husband," says wife, "but I'll keep him." 

As I sit here writing this very strange but true story, I feel as though I’m writing out my own death warrant. Why? Because when my friends, or perfect strangers for that matter, get wind of what is going on in my house, I fear my days are numbered.

My husband has decided to become our housekeeper, or my husband has been abducted by aliens and replaced by a guy who looks exactly like him except he’s a cleaning demon, and a neat-nick.

When my husband Crouse decided to retire from his 40-year profession of graphic design and become a school bus driver, I had my doubts, but he was just so excited about it. What could I say, but “That’s wonderful honey, but I’m in the middle of a grant deadline, so can we talk about this later.” Two things about being a school bus driver, 1) You don’t get paid a lot, but the benefits are wonderful (which was the primary goal since he has medical issues), and 2) You have lots of free time. These two worked together to create a perfect storm of domestic wackiness.

One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times - Chapter 17

#17 – "Always make sure you have plenty of roughage in your diet."
Upon reading my Chapter 16 of One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times, a friend commented, “This one left me wanting a little more SueAnn.” I suspect that after reading this one, she’ll wish I’d left more unsaid.

Really now, who wants to read about pooping? Well, that’s what it is, Re: mom’s reference to getting plenty of “roughage.” Of course I never heard my mother say pooping, or any other distasteful synonym of pooping, other than #2 or a “bowel movement,” because anything else would be profanity which is something my mother never ever did! Roughage was about as rough as my mom’s language ever got.

Although I was a little constipated at starting this one of one hundred things, now I feel movement and am sensing the pending arrival of my muse. Sorry – couldn’t resist.

There’s just so much to say about roughage in the diet! Let’s begin with the obvious. If you’re reading this and you’re a woman, you know that “doing the daily” is a critical, sometimes nerve-wracking, unreliable event. Men just seem to do it on demand, like clockwork, for hours. Women pray for it, anticipate it, celebrate when it happens and grieve when it doesn’t. I’d go so far to say that the lack of “the daily” for a woman, which is a common occurrence since women tend to get easily constipated, is an unspoken yet equally powerful cause of a woman’s bad disposition – right up there with PMS and menopause. Click on Read More Below...

Born Round by Frank Bruni

Born Round is a extraordinary look at body image, weight gain/loss, and eating issues from a completely different perspective - that of a man, and not just any man, but a man famous for his writing about eating. Frank Bruni, the author, has been a food critic for the New York Times since 2004.

Bruni was raised in an Italian family, the cultural backbone of which was all about food – equating to love. Don’t we all have a food culture/history somewhat unique to our family? It seems many family stories revolve around food. As psychotic as family dynamics can be, is it any wonder that our relationships with food are as well?

His funny/scary account of obsessing over his weight, pant size, binging, purging, hiding under large clothes, rescheduling dates to lose 5 pounds, were uncomfortably familiar. Not that I’ve purged, but I’ve certainly been an unwilling participant in all those other classic behaviors that plague women, and apparently men, who love to eat, often to excess, and are torn between accepting their body and wanting to meet some crazy standard, or, OK, just be healthy. Hi, my name is SueAnn and I have an unhealthy relationship with food.

Bruni’s story about his life-long struggle with eating and his weight is basted with many fascinating facets of his life otherwise, so I recommend that you read Born Round.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

I’m glad I didn’t realize that Dave Eggers wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius before I read his book, Zeitoun. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have read Zeitoun, and that would have been a shame because I liked it, a lot.

Zeitoun is Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a New Orleans painting contractor, a pretty successful one actually, who just happens to be Syrian born, and a married father of two, who finds himself in a horrible predicament –stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and eventually arrested and put in prison as a suspected looter and/or terrorist. I found this story fascinating on several levels.