Royal Pain

I'm so confused. I can only half understand things that are going on in my life. Here's what happened: I watched a Lifetime movie about Kate and Wills. As in Middleton and of Wales. Now I can't tell fantasy from reality. Example: last night Mr. V and I started smacking each other--imagine us doing it playfully, if you like--with kitchen utensils over burning cabbage and boiling mustard sauce in our tiny kitchen. "Oh!" I thought. "This is just like that time that Kate smacked the Prince of Wales over the burnt lasagna!". Then it occurred to me that I don't actually know if that happened, I only saw it on a Lifetime movie where some things were from the tabloids and others, I suppose, weren't, and now part of me feels like I might actually know Kate and Wills? But I'm pretty sure I don't.

Other events whose veracity I find cause to doubt: Did Wills really say, "I know, right?" when he and Kate were talking about the Chilean children? Would Harry really impishly refer to himself as "the spare, not the heir"? Did Kate Middleton make a joke about a gnome in her underwear and is her life actually plagiarized from "The Princess Diaries", really? Did I actually spend three hours on a Saturday night watching a Lifetime movie about Kate and Wills? You can see how the line between fantasy and reality has become blurred. William really kissed Kate upon a ski slope; the paparazzi really did take shots of Kate's crotch. How do you go from being the descendant of coal mine workers to the future mother of the crown princess? Seriously, I want to know. But did Will actually almost dive into the lake to win her back? Did they actually call her "Waitie Katie", did the lingere dress really cause Wills to see her as 'more than a friend'? Did I call Kate to console her, crying in the bathtub? Did Mr.V and I actually eat cabbage and mustard for Easter, are we actually that poor? We came back from a walk and our home smelled of Billy Elliot, is this actually our life? These are the questions we may never find answer to.




"I've realized something," I said to my husband, like I was about to tell him the cure to world hunger. "I want to be Kate Middleton."

"We all do," he said. "We all want that." And then, "The British people pay for that lifestyle, you know."

"No," I said. "It can't be so." Immediately I pictured the enormous lush tent on the African savanna where I may or may not have watched William propose to Kate. And the yacht, and the trip to Switzerland, and all the ridiculous hats. So many other things could be done with that money. (I could fly to Paris, for instance.) "I thought it came from back then," I said. I had imagined giant caverns full of gold chains and glittering rubies, like in The Goonies. I could trick the king with a riddle and bring in ten elephants to haul away the gold. The British people allow tax money to support their royal's life of disgusting excess? The Royal family takes their people's earned money and throws lavish weddings and vacations on private islands with it? Really, truly? Actually happening?

It can't be so. It just can't. William says things like "I know, right?", and Kate makes jokes about underwear gnomes to the Queen. This I can swallow. The other thing, I can't. "I would storm that castle," I said. "I would overthrow that throne. Like I did that one time, with the Nazgul."

"Yes," husband said. "That was you."

I am Vesuvius and the events described in this blog may or may not have actually happened.

Post-Edit: I hear that the Of Wales' and the Middletons are paying for the royal wedding out of personal funds. (i.e the money from 'back then', I suppose, and maybe the Middletons chipped in for some Cook's Extra Dry). I wanted to say this because while I feel free to disparage the royals without doing any research on what I'm disparaging them for, I don't want to be responsible for you doing the same.

I most certainly did not learn this information while watching a TLC special speculating on how Kate needs more ambition (I say honey aimed pretty damn high, but whatever) and William, for the first time in his life, may or may not have displeased the Queen. I hope for his sake it wasn't over an underwear gnome joke falling flat; I know how that feels.

Dress Your Fantasies In Oprah and Winchester

So you'll recall--or maybe you won't, just don't tell me you don't remember every word I've ever written on this blog or I'll likely uncontrollably sob. My ego, it's unusually fragile--that last week (hello, sentence structure) I went to Wal-mart for fake french crap and sleep meds.

What I didn't tell you is that the first bottle of Melatonin I picked up contained 100 tablets, each containing 1mg of Melatonin.

The second bottle I picked up contained 5mg tablets of Melatonin.

The third bottle? Each tablet packed 10mg of Melatonin. That's 10 times more than the first bottle, the bottle for humans and not for caffeinated elephants. (Isn't it? I don't do math).

I bought the 10mg pills.

I take two of them at 9:20 (twenty minutes before bedtime as instructed).

If I'm lucky, I doze off before midnight.

My name is Vesuvius, and I am impervious to sleep.


We're going to need another bathroom. I never looked into a mirror until I was thirteen (and boy was that a shock, to discover that not only did I bear little resemblance to D.J. Tanner but that HyperColor beige really was not my color), but my daughters are different and every morning, we're all three of us crammed in there with Indy shellacking her hair to her head and Ayla lining up every hairpin she can find in artistic, unexpected patterns in her locks and I'm wielding a curling iron, a cup of coffee, and a serious 6 am haze and this just is not going to work.

This morning I was fussing with concealer and indulging in a silly fantasy. You know, in my head. I won't tell you exactly where I was, in my head, but let's just say it was similar to imagining yourself on Oprah's couch or practicing your Oscar acceptance speech in the mirror.

Please note I am not admitting to having done either of those things. If you have had those fantasies, you are lame and pathetic, exactly like you always feared.

While I was NOT imagining myself on Oprah or kissing a golden-statue-bearing Colin Firth, I realized that not only were the goblins not removing their heads to bounce them on the ground, but they were both singing. To themselves. Ayla was singing in the shower, a rather unlikely and latent rendition of The Wiggles' "Fruit Salad, Yummy Yummy", considering that we haven't listened to the Wiggles in years. And Indy--well, Indy was singing an improvised ballad by Rapunzel of "Tangled", spiced up with threats I will not repeat here because Indy is going to be a real person one day and it would embarrass her. I think.

Look, the main point of this blog is that I wanted to humiliate you for all those times you've imagined yourself telling Oprah, in peaceful and beatific tones, about how you overcame, say, your ant infestation, or your husband's nose whistling, or succeeded in your life long quest to roll the perfect cake ball. Also to shame you for the times you've fallen asleep scripting all the hilarious things you are going to say on Conan or in your guest spot on 30 Rock when your blog--I mean, uh, "spoken word poem or other thing I have never written"--is recognized for the comedic genius it is, which, I firmly repeat, I have also never done.

But in the spirit of O magazine and what I mistakenly imagine a blog is supposed to be, I would also like to have some sort of insight and it is this: I've been thinking a lot about happiness, and trying and failing to write about it, but I managed to remember something about it in the moment and not in retrospect today. If I had stayed in my head--where I was totally NOT saving the world with the Winchester brothers, wearing perky-butt jeans and packing serious sawed-off heat as 'the one who got away' from Dean--if I had stayed in that place that was so happy in my head, I would have missed all the happy that was going on now.

You know. Like, the real happy. Not the imaginary kind.


I have especially never imagined myself into the scene with the lederhosen.


I mean, I know it's been said before, but I've heard Eckhart Tolle, an exceedingly mild-mannered German, and he never said it like this.

He vould say is more like zis: Uff you spend all zee time imagining you are zee Vinchesteh's totally hot gehl-fwend, you vill miss all zee times your daughters sing inappwopwiate sings in zee showeh. Also, beige is really not youh coloh.

I am Vesuvius and I'm totally not still trying to look like D.J Tanner.

Alias Vesuvius

So I'm at work and they're calling for backup to the cafe through my earpiece.

And let me just say this: all you people with your 'business' and your 'engineering' and your 'computer' 'science' degrees that come with 'actual paychecks'--do you get to look like an Undercover Super Spy when you're at work?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

So my friend is calling me--'Mountaineer, Mountaineer, do you copy? Come in Mountaineer' (I make them call me Mountaineer at work). And I don't know about you, but I didn't get into this line of work because I was willing to just abandon my sisters and brothers in arms in their times of need. 'No person left behind' is my motto and my creed. And I will be your sword and your shield. . .

. . . wait, where was I? Ok so it's a member of my Band of Siblings, if you will (note the gender neutral language? You like?) (I like). I can't let her down. So I rush to answer this call for 'back up' to the 'cafe' even though I've been working here for 20 months and still have no idea what a cafe 'is'.

Turns out in this cafe, every drink you might order--every drink imaginable, my friends, it's like Willy Wonka married the Starbucks siren and they popped out whipped cream children who will lure you with their glucose songs--every drink has a number that corresponds to them that you type into the register. This is how we force people to pay for their frenetic sugar babies.

Not gonna lie: we were really in the thick of things. Foam was flying, the queue was rumbling with mutinous energy, dishes were clattering into the sink like the clean-up after the Mad Hatter's tea party. Because I aim to be a hero I reminded myself that a hero keeps up morale and never says never. So while my comrade was calling out to me the drink numbers, I kept shouting things like: 'They cannot take our freedom!" and "We are just too pretty for God to let us die!" and 'For Frodo!" which was working really well until one of the customers was like "I said my name was Susan!".

Anyway.

Things quiet down. From the ruins of the battlefield I can hear a few fallen muttering and sipping and groaning but for the most part the bullet is dodged. So the last customer approacheth. He's being very patient about the fact that it's taking us so long to save his life--a British person maybe, quite all right and all that--so he observes me scanning the epically long list of numbers to find the one that corresponds perfectly to his drink order so that I might type it in, speak "Copy that" into my Black Ops gear and thus save the day, and he says: There must be a lot of numbers for you all to memorize.

Yeah, I say. And then I say:

It's my first time. Be gentle with me.

Wait--what??

The words are out before I even have time to think. There was never any time to stop them.

This, this moment--this was always going to happen.

What to do? I glance around to see if anyone has overheard, by my comrade--bless her--is running the blender. No one else can hear us, which somehow serves to make this moment seem--intimate? There is nothing, nothing else in this world but me, this unsuspecting stranger, and the fact that I have just made a reference to us. Having First Time. Together.

Then--the blender goes quiet. The world is still. The battlefield sits scattered with the frail remnants of war. Crushed paper cups, disfigured straw wrappers all accordioned and rendered nearly unrecognizable, paper napkins fluttering in the steamer mist like children's hair in the snow. My comrade hunches, shoulders drooped and weary, over one final creation, her eyes glazed with the now-familiar milk lust I've seen on too many soldiers before. So many citizens. So many endless demands. It's changed us in ways we can't tell of. We aren't ready to, or maybe we don't even know. Not yet.

I collect my tiny microphone and into it I hear myself utter: I've been made.

What? he says.

Nothing.

What is left the survivors? A measly 43 cents. I reach out, my hand waiting to drop cold metal into his palm but somehow, this day, I'm reaching for so much more. I consider friendly replies. "Boy do you sure like your whipped cream!" I might say, or, "Sorry about the sex joke!". But this is one of those moments between two human beings in which no words feel right and so, none are necessary.

His hand is ready to receive my paltry offering. The change jingles in his palm, the sound strangely cheery, jarring now after everything we've been through, everything we've seen. He nods a little, eyes cast down, but--am I imagining it? A little something in his eyes, a certain knowing glow? We were two strangers, but yet. Something: fate, God, the desperate, random actions of man--I don't know what, I'm not willing to speculate, but something has brought us both here, to this place, on this day. We are knit together now, in a way I wasn't prepared for.

Something has changed, this day. I have been rendered into a thing made new. Made new by one double entendre, muttered in the heat of war.

I may never see him again. But I will always remember. That 43 cents, that inadvertent innuendo, the lusty smacking of the satiated lips and the air heady with espresso and cream all around us. The man with the medium quad, extra whip, 8 pump sugar fairy deluxaccino.

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Hello. I am going to spend the weekend not worrying about what the hell I am supposed to do and instead nudging myself gently and lovingly in the way of positivity.

In short I intend to cowgirl up.

I would like to sincerely thank all of you who come here and read my blog. It means a great deal to me, and aw shucks. But I love you.

The Royal We are also re-opening the comments section because We think it just feels friendlier.

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I am Vesuvius and So Say We All.