Tag: rants

The roof is finished. The tile guy is here and starting in the kitchen. The floor guy called and confirmed for Monday. This weekend, Tom will empty the house with help from Jess and Troy. I may grab my laptop and a passel of dogs and run away!

I’m no cake decorator, but my cakes usually taste decent because I was taught certain baking tricks by Lynne over the years. Yesterday, it was an adventure to prepare our weekly Survivor dinner in two kitchens, but I wanted to do it so we could all celebrate Lynne’s birthday together. I cooked a pork roast in the crock pot and made a salad in my kitchen, then steamed green beans and baked a cake in Tim’s kitchen (since my stove is out of commission, though it makes an interesting addition to my dining room, not to mention a bonus challenge in the obstacle course that is my house at this moment).

Lindsey came by in the late afternoon to drop off more boxes (And can I just tell you that her boxes are fantastic?), and we started talking. Or rather, I started talking in some manic way because I’m overtired and overextended and over.this.fucking.house.shit. (But as ever, quite ladylike.) Time raced away, as time does when I’m enjoying the company of a friend, until I realized that I needed to finish Lynne’s cake (although Rex tried very hard to “finish it” in his own way when I was bringing it from Tim’s place to mine).

It wasn’t beautiful, but it was a tribute to Lynne’s little Minute, because Minute has been making Lynne laugh for over a year now, and what makes my friends happy makes me happy. Also, the dog blogs. Who doesn’t love a blogging dog?

I like this photo, because it answers Charlie the Unicorn’s question, “Is the meadow on fire?” No, Charlie, but apparently, Minute’s ass is.

Lynne got here and ALSO brought boxes and then proceeded to pack a few of them, because isn’t that what a friend expects to do when you invite her for a birthday dinner? Thanks, Lynne. Between you, Tim, and Tom, the whole boxing thing hasn’t been the nightmare I feared.

I have told y’all I’m not good at multitasking. I need to take on a task and complete it before I move to something else. Otherwise, I never finish anything. That’s what my life is right now. Just a big unfinished mess. Not finishing things is a feature of the character I’m writing, so maybe on a subconscious level I’ve merged with her so I can write her more authentically. At least that’s going to be my defense about the half-packed boxes, the partially cleaned anything, the e-mails left unread for days, the snail mail unsent, and the other thirty or so things in various stages of not finished that are cluttering my life.

Just to show you how easily I can be distracted, that “y’all” I used in the above paragraph is forcing me to segue into a rant. It’s another “Becky’s pet peeves about words” rant!

First, note the placement of the apostrophe: Y’all. An apostrophe stands for missing letters in a contraction. Since “y’all” is a contraction for “you all,” “ya’ll” makes no sense. There are no letters missing from the “all.” The letters are missing from the “you.” Sadly, over the years, I’ve given up on this; it’s no longer my “y’all” issue, and I barely notice it when people capriciously fling that poor apostrophe everywhere but where it should be. (After all, if it’s not misused there, it’ll probably end up screwing up the possessive pronoun “its.”)

THIS is my y’all issue: IT ALWAYS MEANS MORE THAN ONE PERSON. Other than the fact that I was born in another country and lived for a brief time in the West as a toddler, I spent the first two-thirds of my life living in the Region of Y’all. I never, ever, one time, heard any Southerner use “y’all” to mean only one person. Yet for some reason, whenever Southerners are mocked on television or in movies, we are always portrayed using “y’all” for the singular “you.” WE DON’T. There may be some things that a lot of us don’t get, like why someone would put sugar in cornbread or why anyone ever thought Andrew Dice Clay was funny, but we do generally know how to count.

I can speculate about how this happened, though. Here’s my theory in an example.

Cindi walks into the beauty shop. Rene looks up from teasing Joelle’s hair and says, “Hey, Cindi. How y’all doin’?”

If a person not from the Region of Y’all is sitting there, he or she thinks, There’s no one with Cindi. Dumb Southerners. Don’t they know “y’all” means “you all?” Cindi can’t be an all. She’s just one person. This is what happens when people marry their cousins.

No, Outsider, YOU are not understanding that Rene is using Southern shorthand. Rene is not inquiring merely about Cindi’s well-being. Rene is actually saying, “How are you doing, Cindi? Is your husband over his cold? How’s your mother feeling after her hysterectomy? Is your brother Cletis out of jail yet? Is your sister’s ex-husband still gay?” Or as my high school friend Larry used to put it in his succinct way, “How’s your mama and them?” For those of you with more methodical minds, just remember the formula: Y’all = your mama and them.

What Rene would NEVER say when Cindi walks through the door of the beauty shop is, “Well hey, Cindi, ain’t y’all a sight for sore eyes?” Only a Hollywood Southerner would say that.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. It’s time for me to finish packing the bedroom, get cleaned up, and take That Old Woman on some errands. And when I say, “I hope y’all are feeling better,” I mean everybody who’s been feeling sickish lately like Gary, Shannon, Greg, Rhonda, and Lynne.

And I really hope my Cousin Ron–to whom I am not married–gets to leave the hospital today and continues to heal.