Venting

That is one American word that I like. It’s better than “rant”, which is somehow too angry. It’s a bit more 21st century than “letting off steam”. Anyone who lives with small boys who find bodily parts and their various names amusing will understand why I don’t want to say I’m going to “get it off my chest”. And I don’t want to “dustbin”, which is clearly very repressed in a British kind of a way – it suggests that when you need a good scream about life, you should do it into a receptacle which can be safely sealed with a lid, and that somehow your house will be cleaner afterwards. Vent is much the best. And I really need one. It will be an event.

Obviously this will spoil the relentlessly cheerful identity that is Iota, whose life in the Midwest is 'not wrong, just different", a series of endlessly fascinating and amusing opportunities for witty reflection. So for the purposes of this blog entry, I am re-titling my blog "Totally Wrong and Horribly Different and I want to go Home. Now." If you are an easily offended or very patriotic American, look away now. If you are the kind of person who would enjoy seeing Mary Poppins losing her temper and slapping a child, hard, several times, in public, (I hope my mother isn’t reading this…), then this could be for you.

America. You make it impossible to bring up children without spoiling them. You give stickers away free to my child as I leave Wal-Mart. You don’t know what I can get that child to do at home for the sake of a sticker. I don’t need free stickers in her life. Your teachers give the kids candy at school. This makes it really hard not to give them candy at home. Candy comes in such a huge size, that a normal mother looks really mean, because she makes her children share a bag or a bar. You need to produce your candy in smaller sizes. And it’s not candy. It’s SWEETS, or SWEETIES. Not CANDY.

Your preschool tv consists of Barney and Dora and Wunderpets. Need I say more? And for every 30 minutes of kids’ tv, there is 20 minutes of show and 10 minutes of adverts. That is rubbish by any standard. (I haven’t ever timed it, but don’t you dare interrupt a woman mid-vent.) I have to get a friend in London to record and post me bootleg dvds of CBeebies. After-school tv isn’t any better. I do not want my 6 year old to think it is hilariously funny to make jokes about dating girls the whole time. He needs Jungle Run, Raven and Bamzooki. As for adult tv, you have so many adverts about medical conditions, that I hardly dare watch. I am slowly becoming convinced that I need a whole raft of different drugs. The only saving grace is that the adverts are so bad (think of that one about the woman who splits in two, and is so happy because the two drugs she needs are now combined into one tablet, so she can become one person again). If you’re going to have that many adverts, please at least make them interesting, possibly amusing even.

You can’t make a good cup of tea. We all know that. I’m not going to go on about it. But you don’t chat either. I am being drawn inexorably to the conclusion that tea is necessary for chat (I always thought it was tea or wine, but you have wine over here, so it must be just the tea). You talk to each other, ask questions and give answers, and it seems to work for you, but I can’t do it your way. It isn’t chat. You also make too much eye contact, and stand too close to me when you talk to me. Should I stop using deodorant or something? And you use too much of your vocal register. Can’t you be more monotonous? I manage to express surprise and admiration without raising my voice an octave. Can’t you? Try the monotone. If it was good enough for Winston Churchill…

Don’t get me started on George Bush. What is this “learning the lessons of Vietnam” venture? Isn’t it a bit late? If you’d learnt the lessons of Vietnam, might you have resisted invading Iraq? You and our ex-prime minister Tony Blair. (See, even in vent mode I am religiously even-handed.) By the way, he never was Prime Minister Blair. He was the Prime Minister, or Tony Blair, or Mr Blair. Never Prime Minister Blair.

When you drive, it is so darn polite. Everyone knows that a woman having a bad day needs the opportunity to nip out assertively in traffic, to zoom away from a junction in a most impressive manner, to race someone to the last parking spot. With your sluggish automatics and 40 mph speed limit in town, you deny a woman these small but significant pleasures.

Why do you have insects that sound like digital bleeps? I do not like it when poor Husband has to open the bedroom window and say, “see, it’s an insect of some kind, not something in the kitchen, or an alarm going off somewhere”. What will that critter have to say for itself the night our smoke alarm needs a new battery, and we get burnt in our beds because I thought it was him imitating the bleep? Huh?

Oh my goodness. That’s 916 words, and I’ve only just started. Enough venting for one day, though.