Throw in some tiki torches, Jeff Probst and a tribal council and we’re good to go

Last week, I happened to mention to a friend how grateful I was that Zoe had managed to make it all the way to her junior year of high school without becoming immersed in the depraved, psychotic, pus-filled staph infection that is teenaged girl drama. It had been relatively smooth sailing within her group of friends and I was *this* close to exhaling.

Know what happened next?

If you guessed “someone spiked the air with laxatives and then two tons of runny shit hit the fan and sprayed all over your optimism?” DING DING DING DING DING! Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

By the way, since when is a chicken dinner a coveted prize? And if it is, then why isn’t my family a little more grateful five days out of the week?

It’s kind of like the time I emailed another friend “Oliver’s gone a week without pooping in the house! Woot!” And not five minutes later, Oliver flipped me the bird by excreting a reasonable facsimile of the Rocky Mountains behind the couch.

Or the time I posted on my blog that we were all healthy and happy and not ten hours later, we were all Welcome to the Barfiarreah! PULL UP A TOILET AND STAY AWHILE.

When will I learn to not tempt fate? And how come when I say stuff like “I’ll never see my abs again without an X-ray or an autopsy,” fate ignores me?

I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of the drama. Suffice it to say that it was a whole bunch of “she said/she said/she said that she said” crap transmitted via touch screens or QWERTY keyboards because God forbid these kids today use their cell phones to actually speak to one another. Why bother using a larynx to share some vitriolic screed when it’s so much faster to use your thumbs? Back in the day, it took us a few minutes to spread miscommunication and misunderstanding, depending on whether we had a rotary or push button phone with a cord that reached into our bedroom for privacy. Today, it can be done in nanoseconds from the couch while watching Big Bang Theory, delivered in short, abbreviated phrases peppered with an appalling lack of punctuation and grammar and an overabundance of acronyms that I either have to Google or tweet with a hashtag of #whatthehelldoesthismean?

It’s all over now and the dust has settled upon new alliances and the carcasses of friendships gone by the wayside. High school is once again a simmering nine month stint on Survivor but without the exotic locale and diet. Unless a cafeteria and fiestada pizza can considered exotic?

Zoe only has a little over one and a half years to go before she’s off to college and with any luck, beyond this rite of passage which, as far as rites go, sucks big, fat, orangutan scrotum. But Helena is only in fifth grade which means I don’t even need to use binoculars to see another round of it coming down the pipe and honestly, I’d rather experience my first period or breaking my hymen or maybe even back labor again than have to deal with more of this kind of petty, hormonal, estrogen-infused angst.

But that’s not likely to happen so right after I write this, I’m off to practice holding my breath for another seven years.

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