The 15th Commandment, July 2009.

Believe it or not, I’m the level-headed person in this [text] conversation.

The other chick is my sister.

She’s blond.

Obviously.

“I want that tattoo like hayden pantierre? has… to live without regrets in Italian. Vivere senza rimplanti. Look it up. Hers is spelled wrong but that’s the right spelling.”

“Never get words in a language you don’t understand tattooed on you”

“That is the right spelling, and I want it on my side like that.”

“Says who? Google? LOL”

“Just look it up and she just said it on the dave. l. show.”

“It probably actually says something like “girl like big penis”.”

“Shut up”

“You know you like big penis, so it’ll be a good tattoo for you.”

“LOL. It’s rimpianti, I thought it was an ‘l’.”

“No—that one just means “girl like tiny penis”. Duh.”

“You’re crazy, just look it up in the Italian Dictionary.”

“Oh yeah… totally got one of those hangin around. BTW, foreign words often mean different things depending on the context. There’s a word in French that means “full” but when used in a sentence, it means “pregnant”. So you’re probably getting “girl is full of big penis and is subsequently pregnant with sextuplets” tattooed on your side… And that’s just NASTY.”

She didn’t respond.

Hopefully she thinks I’m full of shit and will ignore the sage sisterly advice.

“She Who Likes Big Penis” will look plum AWESOME on the Christmas cards, don't you think?

transforme- french for make your kid cry, 2009.

The boys have been on my case for the last month about the new Transformers movie…

I was reminded on a daily basis that it was coming… And that I would need to put on my big girl panties and brave the theaters as soon as it did. (For those of you new to the land of Shakespeare, movie theaters are out to get Judith. And her little dog too, if you know what I'm sayin'– And I think you do. Or maybe not. Whatever. It totally made sense in my head.) So, like the good "let my kids watch movies with guns and alien warfare" mom that I am, I set aside an extra $50 in last week's budget, dropped the girl child off at my sister's, and headed to the seven o'clock feature Wednesday evening.

Which, of course, was totally sold out.

So I bought tickets for the 7:30…

And then spent the next twenty minutes slapping my kids' hands away from the six pounds of illegal candy stashed in my purse while they read over the free little Transformers comic books that the nice lady at the ticket counter handed us as we walked in…

Which, incidentally, gave away the majority of the plot of the movie we were just about to see.

Yay.

The hodgepodge bundle of confusion previews before the movie included the trailer for the new Harry Potter, Ice Age 3, and Public Enemies… the latter causing That Middle One to immediately stick his hands over his eyes due to either the "man shooting at man" violence (as opposed to man shooting at robot violence, which is obviously acceptable) or the fact that I've ogled Johnny Depp so much during my child's lifetime that the actor has simply become the equivalent of yucky grown-up kissing scenes and other random televised moments from which children run screaming.

Oh god…

Johnny Depp has totally become my child's Freddy Krueger/The Thorn Birds.

That is just so wrong on so many levels.

The movie itself was what I expected and along the lines of the first movie, with the exceptions of the addition of more cursing (to which my child would basically scream at the screen, "That's a baaad word!") , the fact that you saw more people actually killed as opposed to implied killed (I prefer the implied killed, truth be told.), and the extremely unnecessary 45 minutes of scenes that switched back and forth between dude running in circles and random indiscernible robots fighting.

My kid, however, was NOT impressed.

[Hi! This is your friendly neighborhood spoiler warning. If the plot of a silly action flick precedes your desire to continue reading this witty and anecdotal post, I suggest you turn back now... and perhaps take another long life-look into your priorities.]

Dude, they killed Optimus Prime.

They. Killed. Optimus. Prime.

We were hardly into the movie at all when it happened, and I looked over to see the most heartbreaking devastation on his sweet little face as he watched the screen… There were tears in his eyes, people. TEARS.

And then he turned to me with a look that can only be decribed as,

"What in the ever-living HELL is going on here? What did they DO? Which DUMBASS is responsible for THIS? Mama, DOOOOO something!"

Followed by an adamant,

"It's time to go home now, Mama."

I patted his knee and reassured him that things would get better…

He was doubtful.

I then spent the next thirty or forty minutes watching as his little face fell farther and farther as it seemed the good guys could never win, all the while thinking myself, "What in the ever-living HELL is going on here? What did they DO? Which DUMBASS is responsible for THIS?"

The good guys were losing so much, that even the smallest coup received an exuberant yell and two little five-year-old hands thrown in the air with joy.

It. was. depressing.

When we finally got up for the obligulatory "important scene" bathroom break, he again told me that it was time to go home. This time, though, he threw in a quivering lip for good measure.

The quivering lip.

Sigh.

Balancing myself, as no clumsy person should, while using my foot to flush the toilet, I explained to him that they were going to bring Optimus back. Sam had a plan. And if theycould bring Mega-whatever-his-name-is back from the dead, then I'm certain, CERTAIN, that they could bring Optimus back as well.

He looked hopeful.

All was right with the world…

Then they killed Sam.

Damnit.

In the end, though, everything turned out fine… Good guys won.  Bad guys lost (but got away for another movie,of course).  Kid was happy (although perhaps a bit more jaded). And I finally got around to drinking that bottle of shiraz that I bought last week.

Another movie experience well spent.

Big girl panties, indeed.

I love tomatoes.

Particularly the kind you find in baskets in little shacks along the country highway…

I was born in a very small hospital  in a very small town in Arkansas in 1979. The same very small town in which both my mother and grandmother were also born. I have no recollection of living there as the maternal side of my family had all relocated to a not quite equally small town in southern Louisiana dozens of years before, my mother's marriage and my birth being part of but a brief sojourn to her father's.

As history tells it, the women in my family have a knack for leaving their spouses in the razorback state.

Keeping with tradition, we left that very small town just before my first birthday-  the fact that my father would follow and I would welcome a baby sister seven days before my second is part of an entirely different tale. That first year, however, provided easily exaggerated stories full of baby-raising etiquette in the country that continue to be told across a dinner plate to this day.

One of my favorites revolves around a toddler me (insert your ahhhhs here) monkeying my way up to the shelf high above the sink, found, naked as toddlers are wont to be, only after consuming half of the crate of freshly picked tomatoes stored there.

And although we no longer considered ourselves "Arkansans", we headed back to that very small town every Easter, Thanksgiving, and summer to visit with my grandfather and great-grandmother still living there. This, of course, being of the time that seat belts were more of a personal preference than a required by law accessory, my mother would simply toss a babycrib matress, a couple of pillows, and a blanket in the backseat of the car, and my sisters and I would would sleep the eight hours of country highway there.

We'd always return with a trunkload of tomatoes- this, of course, being of the time of really big trunks. They'd last two days. Tops.

When I was seventeen, I took the trip with my Granny for her fiftieth high school reunion. The tape player sang in the voices of Randy Travis and The Big Bopper for ten solid hours. (It seems that no matter how many times one travels the same path, there's always the chance of a wrong turn ahead. Especially in a town that smells like a paper mill.) We were still talking about the incongruity of taking that wrong turn two days later, when we realized that we forgot to pickup tomatoes. We stopped at the first roadside shack filled with baskets.

It had a sign that said, "There are some bags under the counter. Please put money in the jar. Thank you."

I was six weeks pregnant when I took my new husband to meet my family for the first time in that very small town. He drove a fast little sports car and took the liberty of printing out directions beforehand. It took us six and a half hours, and I recognized not a single landmark on the way. On the return trip, I forced him to watch in horror as I simply used my pant leg to wipe away the garden dust from tomato after tomato and devoured them like apples, all the while insisting that we take the familiar way home because I didn't know where to find the farm shacks along the new route.

When we moved to Arkansas in 2004, and I found myself in a small town with no friends, no Starbucks, and not even a Walmart within 30 miles, I consoled myself with the thought that a country highway was but a stone's throw away. And where there's a country highway in Arkansas, there are bound to be farm shacks with fresh tomatoes.

And I love tomatoes.

Particularly the kind you find in baskets in little shacks along the country highway…

Of course, as things go in my life, I'm terribly allergic to them.(Didn't see that one coming? First time here, eh?)

The crate of tomatoes high above the kitchen sink? They were stored there to keep me out- to avoid the burn marks the juice would cause on my little toddler mouth and chin- the same burn marks which make the childhood story interesting enough for the repeat dinner performance. My new husband's look of horror? Was nothing compared to the look on his face once I started to swell, I assure you.

Now, after a thirty year battle, I've managed to bully this allergy into an occasional reaction to something completely random… like every thirteenth pizza, such as the one I ate two days ago.

My lips currently look as if I have the plague and burn as if the fires have hell have taken up permanent residence on my face. I can't wear lipstick and found myself desperately wishing that my bangs were long enough to cover my entire face when I was out running errands today…

And still I crave tomatoes.

No doubt, I always will.