Speechless...

Rarely am I short of words. Rarer still am I at a loss because I'm smiling so much. This morning was one of those times.

Folks, it's a boy.
Happy Holidays.

Wax On...

For generations, the Copeland men have had a history of going bald early. Not once have I seen a picture of my grandfather with hair, the earliest image being in his early twenties. My father was doing the comb-over by my age. I remember a number of years ago when I said a little prayer that went a little something like this:

“Dear Lord, let me keep my hair. You and I both know you haven’t given me much, so be a peach just give me this one little thing.”

Apparently he questioned my sincerity and decided to turn that prayer into his own little punch-line. (Silly god and his abuse of the agnostic.) Over the last few years I’ve started growing hair in places that I just really don’t need extra hair.

Last year alone I harvested more ear hair then I will need out of my entire lifetime. I could make a patchwork quilt out of the yards of nose hair I have on a monthly basis. The woman that used to cut my hair once asked me how far down my neck she should trim.

Yeah god… really damn funny.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been overly surprised when my wife turned to me after my haircut the other day and said “Ok honey… now I know you won’t want to do this, but lets try and separate that eyebrow you have going on.”

Oy.

I truly thought that after I got married the days of a cute young blonde pouring hot wax on me were over.

From what I can tell, when you get your eyebrows waxed they aren’t supposed to take half your eyelid with it. But alas, she did. Jenn says that “it just got the tender part of your skin”, but everyone else wonders how I got the scar. So before they get the truth, they have to suffer through one of my bullshit machismo stories…

“Well, ya see… sometimes, when you’re usin’ a chainsaw, that chain’ll just snaps and whips back in your eye. Now luckily I was able reach up and catch that sum-bitch before it did too much damage…”

“I burned it on the tailpipe of my monster truck.”

“That shark jumped right on outta the ocean and tried to bite my eye. Luckily I punched it in the kidney before it got too good a hold.”

The blog that wasn't...

Miss me? Well apparently Blogspot in their hurry to get me to upgrade to their beta didn’t actually check to see if the damn thing worked or not and I’ve been locked out of my blog for over a week. I was able to log in for about an hour late Wednesday night, but otherwise, nada. I wrote a long entry, hit “submit” and it came back with “No bitch… you submit! You bend over, grab an ankle and take it like your cellmate’s got his name tattooed on your forehead and nicknamed your bunghole Stephanie!”

Or maybe it was just a “The connection was reset” error… at this point it’s kinda hard to remember.

Point is I’m thinking it’s about time to make an escape. So I started a little blog on my website, http://www.brokeni.com/serendipity/ and I think I’m just going to start posting there.

In the meantime, I thought I would cover some of the various rants I would have gone on last week in condensed format. Please try to keep up.

Chele (I’m sick of calling her my sister-in-law) has been writing a lot about her utter bah-humbugginess around this time of year, and normally, I can’t help but give a “preach on” about such rants. Unfortunately this year’s been a little different. I’ve been having a tough time getting into my normal scrooge-like spirit. I hate to say it, but on occasion I’ve gotten dangerously close to jolly.

The reasoning should be fairly obvious, but basically, just looking towards the future doesn’t seem so damn bleak this year.

But still, I felt like I lost a little something not being able to go off about how people lose all sense of taste around the holidays. What other time of year do red, green, yellow go together? I mean, what kind of fucked up color wheel are you smoking? What is it about Christmas makes people think a metallic white Christmas tree with blue lights would look good? And that fake log with candle-shaped light-bulbs you’re using for a centerpiece looks like Larry the Cable Guy is your interior designer.

Luckily, there’s nothing like walking into the local Walgreen’s to get a bit of that yuletide hatin’ mojo back. Sitting on the shelf was—get this—Hip Hop Santa. Complete with a backwards baseball cap, and hip swinging motion. But what was most disturbing was that the damn thing came in both Classical Caucasian flavor or more street-cred African American.

Now, I can certainly appreciate the dilemma that a black man must face in explaining why a fat white boy breaks in their home every year to leave gifts, but I don’t see how this is any less racially insensitive then, say, dressing in blackface.

So I stood there, with my moral outrage at moronically crass commercialism, a large twenty-something black woman approached the display. Busting out of her way too short t-shirt and dirty white sweatpants, she stood there for a moment before hitting the “play” trigger. As she began to gyrate and sing in sync with little rapper Santa, I realized that I might be putting a bit to much thought into all of this.

++++++++++++

On one final note, my wife and I have been driving each other nuts trying to move while weaving in all of the nuttiness of the holidays. A few months back, when I was writing about the #2 heartbreak, I mentioned that she may have thrown out a picture of Rachelle and I(and Rachelle's son), where I was sporting a power mullet. Well you’ll all be happy to know that the picture was found this past weekend, mullet well in tact. I share it’s funkiness with you now: