Category: funny ha-ha

Bloglet: Boomerang Bantering

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Every now and then I use slangs with TO and often it comes back to me in a very amusing way. He was using selective audition with me today when I was asking him to do a couple of things around the house. I rolled my eyes at him and told him not to be a doofus. And bang comes back the reply, “You’re a doofus!”

I walk off and mentally tell myself to wait for it and sure enough comes the query,”Ayu, what’s a doofus?” I tell him it’s a silly person and he mulls it over and says, “Ok..you’re a doofus Ayu”.

Ah..summer holidays..such a joy!

Blissful Calamity: November 2010

The Stare

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I have an almost-10 year old. He’s lazy like his father and me. We aren’t the gung ho types who jump to it and proactively clean and get shit done. We get to it when we can’t find things and usually at the last minute. Sort of defeats the purpose of being a housewife I guess but my parents’ cleaning gene escaped me but I wasn’t about to let it escape my kid. Not entirely.

We’ve made a deal; once he gets up in the morning he has to make the bed. Properly. Of course that’s when hands start to hurt and the bedspread seems to be made of cement rather than cotton but I’ve decided to be firm. What am also being firm about is the extent of halfheartedness I’ll allow in the task.

Today he went around the bed like a puppy chasing its tail in trying to get the bedspread to stay on the bed evenly. To say it looked like one of those asymmetrical dresses that seem to be the rage, would be downplaying it. Half the bedspread was covering the floor and the throw pillows were thrown on the floor and living up to their name and there was a little man brushing his hands with accomplishment saying, “Done!”

But I have learnt one thing from my father if nothing else…’The Stare’. My father is the master of ‘The Stare’. His stare is so potent that I could feel it burning through a crowded room, aimed right at me like a smack on the head. Btw, the beauty of this is that you don’t have to actually smack or even raise your hands…you frown and let your face settle in its most disapproving pattern and let it rest. The victim…erm the target is drawn by the vibes given off said face and is browbeaten into doing your bidding. It’s magic at its best. It’s a thing of beauty that I hadn’t appreciated while it was being leveled at me.

Over the years the stare as been leveled at others found to be lacking, an errant boyfriend here and there, friends who’ve been dressed inappropriately or when he thought I was dressed like a hobo (aka too casually for college and the sobriety of Chaucer and Matthew Arnold). And the stare burns into you…it’s like a Dark Mark that hovers till you’ve ceded to its commands.

Today, after TO kept playing tag with the bedspread I leveled my stare at him and after a few studied shrugs of nonchalance and innocence, he said, “OK FINE!!!” and made the bed. It could still do with a few tugs here and there but at least the bed’s covered and not the floor.

See, they don’t tell you these things in the parenting books. This stuff’s invaluable! Of course the stare’s something every married man is familiar with. They are also more familiar with the menacing tones of the phrase, “We need to talk”…

I think I’ll just dole out the evilness today…mwaaahaaa

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Ye Gods…

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My child is currently anti-clowns. Especially Pennywise. Apparently he snuck a look at the new IT and it creeped him out big time. So Pennywise is the present symbol of everything that’s bad in his freaky little world.

Today after he got back from school he was using me as a trampoline and I made a scary face and did my scary laugh to get him to leave me alone. Apparently I was too successful because he called me Pennywise.

Knowing how he feels about the character, I made my sad face (I have a whole gamut, I’m not like Zoolander) and he immediately rushed to mollify me saying,”Don’t be sad..you’re just like Pennywise…only nice.”

Yeah..just call me Gymbo.

Our Own Spin On The Puranas

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My kid has his own way of narrating things. He’s big on prepositions and paraphrases to his heart’s content and the end results are hilarious to say the least. However, we dare not laugh. Thankfully he doesn’t read (or get) my blog so this is my safe place.

He was interested in knowing about the Greek and Roman Gods and so I told him whatever I knew. But with the multihued Hindu pantheon up for grabs, it was just a matter of time till the mother-son team descended on the unsuspecting celestial beings and twisted them to our own understanding. So here goes a conversation between TO and Red. All the stuff in parentheses are my interjections.

Image result for narasimha god

” So there was this guy called Prahland and he totally liked Vishnu. His dad was a really bad guy, I can’t remember his name (Hiranyakashipu)..oh yeah, him. So Prahlad was good and his dad was bad and his dad wanted to kill everyone and so he kicked the holding thing in his palace (wtf…it’s a pillar not a holding thing…oh wait yes it kind of is) and the lion swami came out…he was half lion and half man and we had seen him in Pondicherry (Hampi), oh yeah Hampi and he was wearing a cap (a crown) and he ripped that guy’s dad’s stomach and he killed him.”

Red: semi-proud, more than a little confused and wondering what nextImage result for dafuq gif

Me: this kid is going to kick ass in precis writing if that’s still part of the curriculum for him laterImage result for nazar utarna gif

Here endeth the lesson

Image result for narasimha god

 

Creativity Unleashed

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I came home from running an errand to find Red and TO at lunch. Red opened the door and told me with his usual straight face that our child was telling him a VERY interesting story which was catastrophic in its scope but had some pockets of optimism and redemption in it.

So it goes like this- It was the end of the world and I had died. Red had died too but TO had a way of bringing him back from the dead. That courtesy was not extended to me. Anyhow, I was dead, Red was dead and quite a few people who were known to us had either perished in the bad ass earthquake that leapfrogged up the Richter scale and touched a 100! For a few others who weren’t lucky enough to die of the super earthquake, a Megalodon came and swallowed them up.

TO was able to save a few (not all) people from the gigantic prehistoric shark by using a knife. Cue the ‘awwws’ people! And then there was a tsunami which came and swept everyone else away. All in all, it was not a good day for humanity.

The one bright spot, if one can call it that, was before I died and set off the chain reaction of humanity’s extinction, I wrote down the all-important, uber-secret, mysterious and obscure password to the iPad on a piece of paper that my darling son found while surviving an off-the-charts earthquake, killing 95 ft long sharks and apparently coasting through towering waves that drowned out millions. This is called unleashing the kraken (of imagination).

Welcome to Apocalypse 3.0

Image courtesy: redbubble.com

Snapchat? Snapshut!

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I was reading an article about Snapchat and it said that the app had been gaining momentum in India. Their filters being what draws people (read silly youngsters) to download the app and a gazillion images of themselves and unleashing it on another gazillion and equally silly youngsters.

Quite a few smartphones are riding that same wave and have integrated the fun (silly) filters in their native camera software to make it for enjoyable (??) for the users. I have that feature on my phone and it’s an occasional stopgap session of silliness with my kid when we have to kill time and can’t think of anything else to do.

I decided to test drive Snapchat for a bit today and see what the fuss was all about. And I did see it. But am not 16 anymore and don’t take kindly to my skin being airbrushed to ridiculous proportions. As for barfing out rainbows…that can get old really fast.

So here are the Snapchat memories I’ll carry with me. For as long as it takes me to finish writing this blog post anyhow.

Toodles!

Oh God! You Ape!

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The Offspring (TO) had his second brush with the Big Questions- where did all life come from, does God exist et al? The first one was when Red’s grandma passed away.

Apparently the child who can believe in different categories of dragons, is having trouble believing that a “Supreme Being” created Man.

He got off the bus one day, engaged in a minor aggressive strap fight (hitting someone with the strap of the bookbag) with a classmate. The reason? The classmate sided with another child who said God made the Earth and people and is R-E-A-L. TO took exception to all of the above and then the problem began in earnest.

Most parents tell their kids that God exists and He should be deferred to because he made the whole universe etc etc. For Hindus, we have a whole smorgasbord of Gods to choose from and we even mix it up depending on the days of the week or festivals or situation that’s on our radar. Might sound flaky but it isn’t. Just years and years of indoctrination in following and believing in a way of living that works for most of us.

Red and I discussed raising TO to either believe or not believe and decided that we wouldn’t stop him from getting exposed to religious practices that are a part of our traditions and surroundings but neither would we fill his head with stuff about Heaven and Hell.

However, we have not got around to taking him to temples or any places of worship either; proactively. If it’s happened, it’s been purely incidental. And in the process we have a child who has questions about a LOT of things but who essentially perceives the world mostly in black and white.

His thinking hasn’t allowed much of gray to seep into his cognitive palette (ooh that’s a nice example of a neologism) and he tends to be rather absolute as for the most part.

When I was listening to him talk about the “incident”, I asked him how he knew there was no God or that He/She hadn’t created the World and he said that he’d learnt in science that homo sapiens came from apes. And that all life started from small “things” in water and then they started to grow and change and we got reptiles, birds and dinosaurs. The conversation unfortunately lasted too long while being expounded on dinosaurs but that’s par for course. *rolls eyes*

Then came humans who were weird looking (am paraphrasing here) and who crawled and then they learnt to stand up and walk straight. Then we got apes and “normal” human beings.

I kept trying to ask him in as many lay terms as possible about the point of origin of creation etc and finally simplified it to stating that reptiles, birds, mammals are all different from each other so how did all these different forms get created. For example, where did the monkeys come from? And pat came the reply- from monkey parents. Can’t top that can you?

So cheers to you Darwin and whoever and whatever created the world. We’re sticking to our monkey parents, thank you very much!

P.S: Maybe when he’s 30 I can tell him my theory about the galactic amoeba who may be responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle!