Mismatched Shoes and Upside Down Pizza

By Lori B. Duff

Lori B. Duff had two choices: she could have a career-ending, news worthy mid-life crisis, or she could write a book.  Lucky for you, she wrote a book.  This memoir, filled with hilarious essays, covers such diverse subjects as male-female relationships, parenting, grammar, travel, and the general disasters that occur to the good, the bad, and the clumsy. Sometimes, you might even find unexpected wisdom. Here you will discover the law of conservation of head hair (every hair that falls from a man’s scalp reappears on mature woman’s face); what happens when senior citizens hijack a wedding bus; why ziplining in the rain is more fun; what to buy your wife for her birthday; what an introverted mom is to do with an extroverted son; and other musings on life, the universe, and everything. Lori’s writing has been described as having the sensibility of Erma Bombeck, with the hilarity of Dave Barry and keen sense of observation of David Sedaris. Sometimes, even people who aren’t her Mom say these things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lori Duff
• Release date: Nov 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781494476182

Lori B. Duff

Lori B. Duff is the two-time winner of the Georgia Bar Journal's annual fiction competition and has won the Foreword Indies Gold Medal for humor.  She serves as the 2022-2024 President of the National Society for Newspaper Columnists and is a Past President of the Georgia Council for Municipal Court Judges.  She's married and has two adult children who will always be her babies.  In her spare time, she practices law in Loganville, Georgia.

Book preview

To my family,

Without whom,

I’d have nothing to write about.

INTRODUCTION

ODE TO FIVE GUYS

LADY IN WAITING

WHY I READ BAD BOOKS

AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF REALLY OBVIOUS THINGS

WHAT YOUR GUIDANCE COUNSELOR WON’T TELL YOU

BALLOONS FOR DUMMIES

MY LIFE FROM A-Z

FOR THE LOVE OF SPORTS FANS

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

What? WHAT?????

CELL PHONING FOR DUMMIES

SCHMINSTAGRAM

WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME TOMORROW?

JUDGING BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS

LOOK AT ME!!!!!

I WILL JUDGE YOU FOR A MISPLACED APOSTROPHE

CALL ME MAYBE? HI, MAYBE.

EVERYTHING OLD IS (PAINFULLY) NEW AGAIN

GOLDEN RULES OF THE ROAD (AND THE GROCERY STORE)

COUPON QUEENS

ONE FROM COLUMN A.....

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!!!

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE

FOOD

COMFORT FOOD

FOR THE LOVE OF CHEETOS

MURPHY’S LAW? HAH! DUFF’S LAW IS WORSE

DAYLIGHT JET LAG TIME

ZIPLINING IN THE RAIN

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE CLUMSY

CUSTOMER NO-SERVICE

FROM MAZEL TOV TO OY VEY

AMATEUR EYEBALL SURGERY

MISMATCHED SHOES AND UPSIDE DOWN PIZZA

PRE-ADOLESCENT BEAUTY QUEENS

PRETTY PRETTY PRINCESSES

WHAT IS MORE THAN ANNOYING?

BUT BUT BUTT BUTT....MOM!!!

HEY MOM HEY MOM HEY MOM HEY MOM!

READY...AIM...DUCK AND COVER!

AMATEUR HOUR

FROM RAGGED TOP TO RICHES

THE VARIABLE RULES OF WALL BALL

SCAVENGER HUNT

DUMPSTER DIVING WITH GRANDMA

CHAPERONE? WHY SURE! SOUNDS LIKE FUN!

Part One: Banning Books on Buses

Part Two: The Wheels on the Bus Go Not at All

Part Three: Lincoln’s Waffles

Part Four: Give Me Liberty or at Least Give Me a Decent Cup of Coffee

PARENTAL HUMILIATION

GETTING AWAY FROM AT LEAST SOME OF IT

MY HAPPY PLACE

CLUB FRED

SUPREME LUNCH

HELLO MUDDAH, HELLO FADDAH

DE PLANE!! DE PLANE!!

HOLIDAYS AND OTHER REASONS TO CELEBRATE

HALLOWEENIES

A THANKSGIVING POST-MORTEM

CHANGES IN ATTITUDES

MEN AND WOMEN. MOSTLY WOMEN

HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHAT SHE WANTS. (HERE’S A HINT: SHE THINKS SHE IS TELLING YOU.)

BRUNETTES HAVE JUST AS MUCH FUN

NOT BY THE HAIR OF MY CHINNY CHIN CHIN

MAMMARY MASSACRE

LIKE A PHOENIX, I SHALL RISE (AND SPARKLE)

WHEN I WANT YOUR ADVICE I’LL ASK FOR IT

POST SCRIPT

EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED BY WRITING

INTRODUCTION

When I began writing and publishing these – oh, what do you call them? Posts? Essays? Vignettes? Inane ramblings? – stories, I was 42 years old. Which, as all 1980s science fiction geeks know, meant I was the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It also meant that I was (am) ripe for a mid-life crisis. I have too much self-discipline and enjoy being employed too much for a really YouTube worthy and satisfying mid-life crisis, so I gave Great Thought and Planning as to how I might satisfy the urge without creating a scandal. I had a lot of rants built up, and they continue to build. I hoped that these rants would satisfy the urge to spew in public in a semi-productive socially acceptable way.

I am a lawyer by trade, and have been for almost 20 years. Therefore, I feel obligated to begin this particular branch of my adventure with a disclaimer:

No one knows more than I do what Tragedy and Serious Stuff is going on in the world around me. For a living, I hold people’s hands through divorces, deaths, the loss of children (both through death and Court action), scandal, prison, and all manner of true victimhood. Decades of witnessing on a daily basis the worst humanity has to offer has taught me one important lesson: life is waaaaaaaaaay too short not to laugh at every available opportunity. The greatest gift you can give a person is a good belly laugh. When I was younger, I had a friend that was physically abused by his father. And yet, he was one of the funniest people I ever met. I once asked him about that, and he said that when you are laughing you can’t think about anything except what you are laughing about, and so it was his goal to laugh all the time.

My goal is to make you (and me in the process) laugh. After decades of the practice of law, and after a tragi-comic run for office, I know more than anyone how anything you say in public is subject to criticism. I fully expect to be criticized for raging about misplaced apostrophes and those people who are turning left on to a busy road but insist on parking their shiny trucks that have never hauled anything heavier than a 40 pound bag of cat food smack in the middle of the road so you can’t sneak by and make a right turn when there are wars and famine and real tragedy going on. To this I say: you have two choices in this world. You can laugh, or you can cry. I’m choosing to laugh. I hope you will laugh with me.

RANDOM RANTS

ODE TO FIVE GUYS

Oh, Five Guys, how do I love thee? Not for the burgers, which are usually so tall I have to squish them down and unhinge my jaw before I can take a bite. Nor for the Plentiful French Fries, whose place of origin is proudly listed on a chalk board as if, like an oenophile, I could taste the earthy notes in an Idaho Falls potato in contrast to the hints of blackberry in an Iowa potato. (Note: rant for another day – why does a ‘small’ order of French Fries at Five Guys contain so many wonderfully greazy fries that my family of four, including a grown man and a 12 year old boy who regularly eats his weight at one sitting, cannot finish it?)

No, the inspiration for waxing eloquent about Five Guys has nothing to do with the quality of the food. It has to do with the quality of the food distribution and labeling at each individual restaurant. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, Five Guys operates on the front end like many casual restaurants. You order at the counter, and are given an order number, which you wait to hear called. When it is called, you go up to the counter and get your food in a brown paper bag.

Here is the brilliant part: stapled to the front of one of your bags is an order receipt, which lists each item separately, and numbers each item. So far so normal, right? But inside the bag is a foil wrapped burger or dog that has – get this – a numbered sticker on it which corresponds to your ordered item. How simple and brilliant is this? So when I am passing out the burgers, I can look on the front and know whose is whose by the corresponding number and not actually touch anyone else’s food.

I’m not one of those freaky germ people. I don’t believe there is much I can contract from other people touching my food that can’t be cured with penicillin. And most of the people I know are relatively hygienic. Still, I don’t want you lifting the top bun off my sandwich to see if it is the one with or without tomatoes.

This happens a lot. On TV shows about lawyers, we all have offices (even the government employees!) with crystal decanters of thirty year old scotch sitting behind our desks, and go out for steak lunches with a glass of the finest red wines expertly paired. This could not be further from the truth. Today, for example, my lunch consists of beanie weenies in a disposable container. Leftover beanie weenies that I am hoping are still good. I will drink it with water out of an old QT cup. I will eat and drink this gourmet meal while I work and field phone calls from people who won’t pay my invoices. But I digress.

Often, someone in my office will run out to the local fast food joint, or, if we are feeling large, we might order in Chinese. How many other people’s Subway sandwiches have I opened up over the years and had to inspect only to find out that this particular turkey sub is not the one with onions? Even Chinese, which comes in clear containers, isn’t always clear, especially if the meat is fried. Is that pork or chicken under that breading? Won’t know until someone takes a bite.

The point is, the most elegant solutions are often the simplest ones. I hope whoever came up with that brilliant system at Five Guys got some kind of industrial design award and makes a ton of money. I also hope he or she isn’t having beanie weenies during a working lunch. I hope she is finding ten other people with whom to share a small order of well-deserved fries who spent their early, formative years in Idaho Falls.

LADY IN WAITING

As I type this, I am sitting in the waiting area at Gwinnett Duluth Hospital, waiting for my husband, Mike, to have his shoulder surgery. I have to say, this is the cushiest hospital waiting area I’ve ever been in. There are comfortable arm chairs and sofas. And – get this – the coffee is FREE! And so is the wireless. And it is appropriately hushed. So hushed that I don’t want to make the phone calls I have to make for fear of disturbing the hush. And there are some tables to spread your stuff out on. I may have to gather up my work projects and bring them here more often so I can actually get something done without interruption. But for worrying about my husband, I would be in paradise.

They have the funky-coolest system here. When we first checked in, the lady at the front desk gave me a pager like I was waiting for a table at Chili’s. This way I don’t feel tied to this fabulous waiting room and can wander at my leisure and know I will be beckoned if I am needed. I was also given a super-secret black ops code, which was easy to remember because it contained the first two letters of our last name and my husbands first to initials, with a random number (3) in between to fool people. This code is connected to this big screen TV hanging on the wall which lists all the people having surgery by their super secret code and where they are in the process (pre-op, surgery, recovery, etc.) This is such a simple and effective system, I’m betting the hospital was able to trim two people off its payroll whose sole job used to be to answer almost every question with, They’ll come out to get you when they’re ready for you. I liken this system to the uber-efficient system at Five Guys.

Thankfully, there is not, as there tends to be in every other waiting room, some TV blaring with either a ‘news’ show preaching loudly to the choir, or some ‘seriously? That’s a TV show?’ show like, World’s Nastiest Hamburger Joints or Real Clerks at a WalMart in Iowa. I hate these things. I find it impossible to think complete thoughts or read a book or do anything worthwhile while being attacked by this kind of audial and visual stimulus from all sides. In this waiting room, there is another silent TV playing some kind of internal Power Point on a loop that gives ‘helpful’ health and diet tips like, When eating French fries, order a small instead of a large and Drink diet soda instead of the kind with sugar in it. I didn’t watch it for long, but I suspect Always wear your seat belt when driving and Don’t run with scissors were next. In addition to these fascinating facts, I also learned that I was privileged to be in the waiting room during Perianesthesia Nurse Awareness Week. I have to say, up until now, I was unaware.

This is not to say that everything here is perfect. After 7 or 8 cups of free coffee, even I have to switch to something milder. The coffee is free, but not the water. There is your standard complement of overpriced vending machines. It is impossible to eat or drink anything healthy from these machines. After feeding a dollar sixty into the machine, I pressed the button for the one non-artificially flavored beverage, water. (I still find it insane to pay that kind of scratch for filtered tap water, but when you are thirsty, you are thirsty.) Naturally, at 9:45am when I attempted to make the purchase, it was already sold out. Since I had used dollar bills in the machine and couldn’t figure out how to retrieve them, and since I was bound and determined to follow the no-sugared drinks rule that was in heavy rotation ten feet to my right, I was forced to choose between diet caffeine free Coke and Coke Zero. I only ever drink sodas when my tummy is sad, because otherwise they taste more or less like battery acid to me. I didn’t want the additional caffeine, but I cannot bear the taste of saccharine, so Coke Zero it is. The sweetness is just making me thirstier, the caffeine is making me shakier, and I can feel the pits forming in my teeth as they dissolve from all the acid. I guess if I go into cardiac arrest or a diabetic coma, at least I’m already in the hospital. I’m considering just dumping the Coke out and filling the bottle with tap water from the bathroom.

It is a sunny day, and the sun is coming through the skylights that surround the room, making this the least depressing hospital in the world. (That and the fact that this is an outpatient facility, so no one is having life-or-death procedures.) I’m typing this, using enough fingers to make a typing teacher proud, and thinking of my poor husband who will have to do everything as a lefty for the better part of six weeks. I know that he will be in a lot of pain. I know that for the foreseeable future I will try my best to ease his pain and be his right hand, and I know we are in for a rough time ahead of us. Still, for the moment, all is peaceful and quiet out here in the waiting room, and Mike is on the kind of anesthesia and accompanying nerve blockers and pain killers that are only available in a hospital, so neither one of us is feeling much pain. This is a rare treat for both of us. These peaceful moments are hard to come by. I’m going to enjoy it while I can.

WHY I READ BAD BOOKS

I have this obsessive need to know what everyone is talking about. I also believe very strongly that I can’t criticize something unless I have experienced it first hand. Otherwise, I am just parroting other people’s opinions, and I don’t like to do that. I am blessed with the ability to read rather quickly, so it doesn’t take me long to get through most popular literature. As a result, I have found myself reading a whole lot of very bad books in recent years.

A few years ago, everyone with two X chromosomes had read the Twilight series of books, and had very strong feelings about whether the main character, Bella, a mopey, whiny 16 year old, should be on Team Jacob, and spend all of eternity with her childhood friend who just happens to be a Werewolf; or Team Edward, and spend all of eternity with a 200 year old vampire who glitters in sunlight and has a knack for rescuing Bella from her own stupidity.

I have no issues with the supernatural genre. Frankly, I don’t have issues with any genre so long as it is well written or entertaining. As a result, I love love love the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris. They are fabulous mind candy. Not a whole lot of mental nutrition, but fun, enjoyable, three-dimensional characters with well-written, creative stories.

But Bella? Holey moley that chick drives me up a tree. I suffered through the first three books of pouting, and will not read the fourth. Bella struck me as your typical sullen teenager, totally self-absorbed, whiny, and overly dramatic. She is described as being only slightly better than average looking. She has not a single humorous bone in her body. Her father, the local Chief of Police, has the observational skills of peanut butter, and doesn’t seem to notice that Bella’s 200 year old boyfriend sleeps in her bed every night after climbing into her bedroom window. Even less believable than the actual existence of werewolves and vampires is that Edward sleeps in Bella’s bed every night and the only thing that happens there is sleeping (and presumably drooling and snoring, but definitely no hanky panky.) Edward, who has less of a sense of humor than Bella, is supposed to be this hyper-intelligent, worldly, sophisticated, drop-dead gorgeous guy who, for reasons never quite explained or obvious to the reader, has decided that of all the people on planet Earth over the past two centuries, he wants to spend his time including the rest of eternity with this miserable teenager because she smells good, and he doesn’t even consider putting the moves on her. Riiiiiight.

I could go on, and with very little prompting I would, but there are more bad books I want to talk about. So fast forward just a little bit in time, and get ready to roll your eyes further back in your head.

As I write this, everyone with two X chromosomes seems to have moved on from Bella and is obsessed with the 50 Shades of Grey series. Somehow, these books were written as ‘fan fiction’ for the Twilight books, but other than containing unbelievable characters in unbelievable romantic situations and tenth-grade level writing, I saw no similarities.

Before I read these books, I was told that there was a great deal of racy sex in them, but really, the reason to read the series was the relationship between the characters and the interesting psychology. So I read the first two books, and stopped there before my brain took protective measures by jumping out of my skull and hiding under the refrigerator.

In these books, we are supposed to believe that a smoking hot 21 year old college student (Anna) has never ever even had a guy attract her enough to make her desire a kiss. She is oblivious to all the hot men in her life who are obviously falling all over themselves to get to her. She somehow manages to get an exclusive interview with the reclusive Christian Grey, a young, eligible, self-made gazillionaire (who made his gazillions saving the environment, naturally) for the college paper because her equally hot roommate who had somehow managed to do what Oprah and the New York Times did not in wangling the interview, got sick.

Naturally, as a result of her completely run of the mill interview questions, Christian Grey falls madly in love with Anna, and she with him, and they find themselves entangled in an affair that takes three books to describe. Anna goes from total cold fish to hot to trot in approximately one dinner date. Granted, it is a dinner date involving a private helicopter, but still. Christian has Deep Dark Problems, which make him like kinky sex, and she just wants to ‘fix’ him by having kinky sex with him to prove that she really cares. Within three weeks, they are engaged, because super brilliant entrepreneurs have nothing but time on their hands to spend long, leisurely mornings, noons, and nights with a new girlfriend. They are also known for being impulsive and mercurial, and making life-altering decisions quickly like that. Anna regularly admits that she doesn’t understand Christian at all, but it doesn’t matter, because he is super hot, and has Dark Secrets, and she loooooooooooves him, and isn’t that what matters in the end? To top it off, the writing appears to be done by a writer with the level of sophistication of, well, Bella.

Can you think of any lesson in this story you’d want your daughter to learn? Would you want your daughter to spend any of her free time with Anna? I wish my friends and acquaintances would just be honest. You are not reading these books for the psychology. You are not reading them because you care deeply and on a personal level whether or not Anna and Christian can work out their relationship problems. You are reading them because you like the sex scenes. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what you’re in it for. Just quit pretending.

What irritates me the most, I suppose, about Twilight and 50 Shades of Ridiculousness, is how much money the authors of these books seem to be making. I mean, I’m as capitalist as the next person. If you can convince someone to pay money for what you have created, more power to you. But there seems to be a great number of writers out there who know how to turn a phrase, who know how to create characters that come to life, who can make us think or laugh, and who can’t earn a living wage from their writing. These writers, who like me toil on the local scene and pitch ideas and submit manuscripts and query letters hope for that Big Break, struggle with day jobs and