The Art of Breathing.

What is your reaction when your mother asks you something outrageous? Do you find out that you need to do something, like let's say, learn how to breathe? 

That was me. 

So near the end of the year in 2011 my cousin from Germany was coming to stay with us... so we drove off into the foggy sunrise  one morning to pick her up at the airport 2 hours away. After driving about an hour we reached a small town to get some gas.

As my dad stepped out of the car to fill up, my mother pulled down her visor and began to apply some Lancome Lip Gloss. After turning her head this way and that to see how the light hit the sparkling pink of her lips, she smacked them together and then turned around to face me in her seat.

My senses immediately went on high alert. I LOVE my mother, don't get me wrong, but she has a very unique skill to say some of the most outrageous things one has ever heard. 

I had been pretty tired up until then and as soon as she got 'that look' on her face the sleepy fog clouding my brain immediately cleared up. I repeated a mantra in my head of ' Be prepared' and 'What is she going to say?!' Then out of her mouth comes this: 
"Do you like my lip gloss? Are you jealous?" 

I frowned in response and let my guard down... that was not at ALL what I had been expecting her to say... and I don't even know what I had been expecting either. 

"Oh yeah mom, it's awesome. Love it, so jealous." Was the nonchalant reply.

But I noticed her following smirk too late.

" Jessica... would you kiss these lips?" She gave me a mock-sultry look thrown over her shoulder and my eyes widened in shock. 

Had she REALLY just asked me that?! It only took one second to realize that she not only had, but was now awaiting a response. 

So I panicked and scrambled to search my brain for something that was both a really good retort and not offensive at the same time. 

For example, pretending to gag wouldn't be very nice.

So I did the only thing any respectable twenty year old would do. I opened my mouth and prayed that whatever came out of my mouth would not only be witty, but nice as well.
I had no such luck. 
With her expectant look and all of this happening within seconds. 

I opened my mouth, breathed... and began to choke on nothing but air. 
My mom momentarily looked flabberghasted as both my little sisters began to howl with laughter in their seats behind me. 

But what they didn't realize right away, was that I was actually chocking on my own spit and couldn't breathe! 

She looked at my dad who was just paying for the gas and then back at me as I finally stopped gagging and was now dramatically gasping wildly for air. Laughing and trying to breathe at the same time certainly didn't help! 

With my sisters still in hysterics and my mom trying not to laugh herself, she gave me a pointed look.

" The CORRECT response, Jessica, would have been: If you were a boy you'd kiss those lips." Now openly laughing at the irony of the entire situation, I managed in between giggles, "You wouldn't have asked me that if I was a boy!" 

After another full two minutes of dying down giggles my dad finally re-entered the car that had become now dead silent. 

His spider senses tingled as he quirked an eyebrow and turned to look at the four of us and demanded to know what happened.

 My little sisters both immediately launched into the tale at the same time, whilst trying to re-enact the whole thing making the laughter start right back up! 

Upon hearing the story, my dad gave me a humorous look and I tried to explain that it was simply all irony and complete chance that I had started choking on nothing... at that exact moment.

And that, dear friends, is the only time that it is EVER appropriate to choke and gag on nothing in response to a question someone asks you... and even then it cannot be guaranteed where and when the random choking-on-nothing will ever strike next. My only advice...
Learn how to breathe. 
Seriously... put it on your checklist of things to do! 

The phone was ringing! Wasn't it...?

It was a pleasant spring day, after school when I was in high school. I was sitting enjoying some time listening to my mother in the kitchen making supper as I was doing my howmework. 

There was only the sound of the sizzling pot full of food and the delicious aromas of said food wafting over the counter, which was the only barrier between my mother in the kitchen and myself who was sitting in the dinning room table.

There was peace. There was calm. There was suddenly...

"GET THE PHONE NOW!!!!" 

... my mother screaming at me from six feet away. 

Adrenaline immediately coursed through my body as I threw aside the chair that was in my way. It ricocheted off my shins making me tumble over it, and fall to he floor. I scrambled up and over it and threw myself at the counter directly in front of her, then lunged for the phone knocking it over and then shakily managing to grab a hold of it and then lifted it up to her face. 

It had been standing upright, innocently, not even a foot away from her. 
I stared at her in frantic alarm holding the phone out and she stood there blinking in confusion, right before bursting into a bout of hysterical laughter! 

All I could make out in between her chortles were that she had thought she heard the phone ringing. At the time all the kids had a really bad habit for leaving the phone up to mom when it rang, whether she was busy or not. 

So she thought she'd heard the phone and no one was getting it. So naturally that justifies her shrieking at me from five feet away, to hand her something that was right in front of her the whole time.

But still... the sudden change going from quiet to sudden angry bellowing echoing off the windows and kitchen walls... I'll have you know... that scared the CRAP out of me!!! Luckily we get along and to this day we still laugh in stitches about it. ;)
Mom... you're the best! All of my favorite memories revolve around you... <3

#HashtagWars

In a galaxy far, far away, there was a phenomenon known as the hashtags. Most of the citizens in this strange world saw this as a dawning of a new era! The movement of the hashtags rapidly increased across the globe. Forcing the panel of highly esteemed literary experts to all agree and formally include the '#' hashtag symbol as an actual definition in the dictionaries.

There was one person (who, she was certain, wasn't the only one) who was determined to rebel against this phenomenon...

Okay, so I realize we aren't in a galaxy far, far away. But sometimes it really feels like it! I was SHOCKED when I discovered that the meaning for 'hashtag' had been formally introduced into not only one but a few different dictionaries.

That is basically like we are promoting the younger generations to use "txt lngo" in their everyday life.
I watch my younger siblings and cousins (and even just very few hashtag enthusiast friends) all day everyday, hashtag almost everything.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate hashtags per say, but I don't understand their purpose in life either.
That could also be because they started on twitter (I believe) and I don't twitter.

I was okay with Twitter trying to branch out and be unique. They wanted to have their own culture that would permanently set them apart from Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter, as I see it, is a mixture of the two. So introduce the hashtags, and their social media forum had taken on new heights.
And I was perfectly fine with that.

Until hashtags started following people over to facebook, instagram, and literally every other form of media. Both online, and not online!
It's everywhere. Like a virus that has spread.

Yes, some strong wording there... No I still don't hate it. I just find it useless.
And then came the day when my sister posted something on facebook. Her post, was literally 4 words.
with 12 hashtags that followed.

Now my older brother and I decided to take matters into our own hands. She does lots of hashtags, but for this instance the hashtags were not only repetitive and therefore redundant, they were exactly 3 times longer than her original post!

Now normally I don't interfere with people's hashtags, but this was serious. If you're going to hashtag, at least have them make sense, and don't (for the love of all that is good) be repetitive. If you're expecting people to actually read your hashtags, then making hashtags that are so similar that you're basically being a broken record, is going to make us lose interest.
Just saying.

So anyways, like I said, my brother and I decided to do a hashtag war, waged on my unsuspecting sister, and continued even long after she had gone to bed!

It was great fun, especially for me (because I am such a trouble maker) and my brother finds hashtags even more annoying than I do!

Here was how it turned out. Please enjoy our sporadically clever, but mostly just fun teasing replies to her post.

Bro:  #nomorefbhashtags
Me: Can I hashtag that??
Me: #idontunderstandthepointofhashtags
Lil' Sis: ... WOW guys, lol! Hashtag war!
Lil' Sis: ... Oops, I didn't mean war... I feel stupid... (she felt bad because my brother and I have a history of not always getting along.)
Bro: Hey Lil' Sis, we grew up in a world where a hash tag was the number sign on a phone. Typically it would get pressed most after entering a voicemail password. Ha ha.
Me: #oldschool
Bro: #stopdoingthat
Bro: #please
Me: #ohsorry!
Me: #illstopnow
Lil'Sis: #lolyouguysmakemelaugh
(So at this point I was hanging out with a friend who is a band geek, and coincidentally my sisters post had been a band post. So my friend helped me crack a band joke that I didn't understand at all...)
Me: Wow Lil' Sis, SHARP words!
Lil' Sis: LOL!!
Bro: #sorrynotsorry
Me: #youcanteachanolddognewtricks
Me: #hashtagsshouldstayontwitterwheretheybelong
Me: #imdonenow
Me: #brotherwillyouforgiveme?
Me: This has to be my most favorite comments/ conversation I have ever seen!
Bro: # viva la revolution. # see what I did there?
Me: #hashtagwars
       #thiscouldgoonforawhile
Bro: # you promised you'd stop
       # lol
Me: #youredoingitwrong
       #ijustcalledmyvoicemailbyaccident
       #toomanyhashtags
Bro: # on purpose. # viva la revolution step 1
Me: And this all stemmed from one incomplete sentence. Hmm...
       #youknowyourehavingfun
       Oh! Now I see what you did there. It took me a minute
Me: # viva la revolution
Bro: So I'd say it's hashtag YOU'RE doing it wrong.
       Calling your voicemail...
Me: Ha ha nice. Thanks Bro.
Me: Hey I did say right at the start that I don't understand the purpose of hashtags. I think that implies that I don't know how to do it correctly.
Bro: So many notifications for tiny sister tomorrow.

(at this point we'd been going back and forth with the #hastagwars for almost an hour after Lil' Sis had gone to bed!)

Me: # text lingo required.
       Lol yes, I wonder how long we can go on for?
Bro: And look at us tweet tards by the end of the status.
Me: # most comments on a picture/ post ever?
Bro: #we'regetting old.
Me: Ha ha ha! #tweettards
Bro: Grammar kills the hashtag, go figure...
Me: #calledit!
       #textlingo
       #sorry  I meant #txtlngo
       #just killed some brain cells...
       #you're rebuttal?
Bro: *Many
       But we did it together ha ha.
       #teamwork
Me: ha ha #this is fun!
       We should do #hashtagwars more often!
Bro: I'm not so sure about that, but destroying Lil Sis's statuses after her #bedtime or #anytime
Me: yes #agreed  what should we call this madness?

(I think at this point he had either gone to bed and left me to my own devices, or got fed up with the hashtag war.)
Me: I feel like looking up and seeing what the history of the hashtag is... #nerdiness
Me #foundit
Me: "A hashtag is a work or an unspaced phrase preficed with the hash character, #, to form a label. It is a type of metadata tag. Words or phrases in messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter,  or VK may be tagged by entering # before them. 1. either as they appear in a sentence or 2. appended to it. The term hashtag can also refer to the hash symbol itself when used in the context of a hashtag.
A hashtag allows grouping of similarly tagged messages, and also allows an electronic search to return all messages that contain it.
Because of it's widespread use, the word, hashtag,  was added to the Oxford English dictionary in June 2014.

Me:...
Me: #thatsjustsad

So that was our crazy first episode of the hashtag wars. Who knows if there will be a second one. I may not cling to it as much as I did then, purely because I enjoyed the irony of it all.
Although, after the first 3 hashtags that I wrote I found myself getting irritated because I couldn't type properly. Not to mention that we were both surprisingly unsurprised that grammar killed the hashtag.

But how remarkably sad that grammar, and spelling are now being encouraged by the oxford dictionary. Because in order to properly hashtag, you can't have spaces or any accentuating marks for grammar.
That's almost like legalizing Marijuana because "everyone does it". Oh wait...

If we thought that society now of days had an issue with people in my 20's generation having poor grammar (and even text lingo on resume's) now, imagine in 15 or so years when the hashtag generation gets there?

I am sure I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. But I am also that person who loves the Jane Austen or even Shakespear generation of writing and authors. That time era, and the ones they reference in their writing, I find fascinating. Because words held more meaning, which is why there are so many words in the English language. Words held more meaning and properly portrayed the exact emotions that the speakers felt. The language is beautiful and flows, and no one talks like that anymore.
Instead of "Fair thee well" upon departure, which means not only farewell, but to take care at the same time, we have kids texting and saying "g2g". They are learning to look down at an impassive screen, and they don't call to learn social skills. And they aren't learning proper grammar.

But that is an entirely different rant altogether!

We literally have hand held devices that can access the wealth of all knowledge and information, and what do we use it for? To tweet our lunch and look up pictures of cat's all while saying "#cute" or "#delish!".

I don't have kids, but I do have a nephew and younger siblings, so I must implore of you...

Stop the hashtags!

# viva la revolution!

Hopefully you enjoyed #hashtagwars episode 1!