People Just Don't Talk This Way.
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Evil Things
No wonder Ben and I have foul-mouthed children. They were raised that way. Yes, it's all our fault, and I don't foresee it stopping.

Ben and I, before we met, both had a rather plain and pithy way of putting things. It was one of the things I loved about him. Way back when we first met, when I was working as his paralegal and only knew him from the office, we were discussing a particularly thorny case when he told me I can tell you in one word what the problem with this case is. And then he spoke a one-word description of the parties to the lawsuit which I will not repeat here, because it was somewhat un-PC and I don't wish hate mail. But I tended to agreed with him, and it did shed light on a lot of strange behavior, and I thought: This guy will SAY the stuff that everyone else THINKS, but will not say. Just another reason why Ben is perfect for me.

Fast forward eight years; we've been married for five and a half years and have three young children. And our plain and pithy manner of expression is second nature. In the checkout line at Target last weekend, we spotted a headline about Britney Spears and her elective C-section -- she didn't even try to have that baby the old-fashioned way and was quoted as saying she'd always known she wanted a Caesarean.

Me: Bleargh, that dumb bunny was too lazy to grunt out a baby.

Ben: Yeah, didn't want to stretch out the entertainment center.

Target Clerk: *swallows tongue* *giggles uncontrollably*

See? We just forget where we are sometimes. Once in Solvang, the tackily charming ersatz Danish village up in the Santa Ynez Valley, we got caught in the rain:

Ben: We should get inside a store. How about this one?

Me [squinting at shop]: Yeah, okay, let's go in this tourist trap and see what kind of cheesy shit they're foisting off on the yahoos.

Midwestern Tourist Lady [overhearing]: *swallows tongue* Mpppfffh!

And our kids? Chips off the old block.

Sam [putting on clean underwear]: Look! I have a Power Ranger on my peepee!

Ben: Hey, that's cool. I wish I had a Power Ranger on MY peepee.

It's a lot like Matt's My Peepee is BIGGER Than Yours! T-shirt -- only in our house is this type of thing considered ordinary and unremarkable. In public, sometimes we forget that people just don't talk that way. As John Irving once observed, that's always the way with families: Strange as hell to the outside world, but ordinary to each other.