Devil's (Dog) Advocate

The vending machine at work is now serving up Devil Dogs.
And I'm looking at them, and I hear my mother's voice saying, "Devil Dogs. That's the last thing you need. Fine. You know what? Why don't you weigh 300 pounds? And you'll have to buy all your clothes out of catalogs. And I'm not giving you money for that.And I didn't want to tell you this to upset you, but [insert the name of anyone she knows who is overweight] is having a lot of health problems now, and much as you say you don't care, you don't want that."

But then, I thought, "Shut up, invisible Mom who is only in my head. Devil Dogs fill an emotional void, and are delicious."


And then I imagined Mom reading this, which she does, and sending me an email:
1. You should listen to that voice.
2. Stop making me out to be some sort of monster on your blog. And maybe if you spent a little less time blogging and a little more time outside, walking, maybe then you'd deserve some Devil Dogs.
3. [Insert some reference to an upcoming family event for which all details were determined without my input. Like, "By the way, your sister and I talked, and we decided we're going to do Chanukah at 9 in the morning the third Saturday of November. Do you want pot roast or corned beef?"]
4. How's the closet going? You know, if you spent half as much time working on that closet as you did complaining about me in your blog, you'd be done. And then, maybe you'd deserve some Devil Dogs.

But in all honesty, my mother wants the best for me, and truth be told, my knees hurt. . . so I should probably lay off the Devil Dogs for a while. And that's what I'm going to try to do. So even thought I'd like to fill my bowls this weekend (bowls she bought me, for the record) with delicious macaroni and cheese, I'm afraid it's going to be Cheerios and skim milk for the long haul.

In other news, thank you to everyone who offered suggestions for things starting with the letter "t" without asking questions. It was my father's 60th birthday last week, and I wanted to buy him 6 "t" things. I wound up getting him 6 tea bags. Get it? "Six tea" sounds like "sixty." I must have told 100 people that joke last week, and was met mostly with either groans or cries of, "But you got him something else, too, right?" (Yes, I got him a CD.) But since my father and I share a love of really corny, bad jokes, he appreciated the gift. And I think he might actually drink the tea.

You know what goes great with tea? Devil Dogs.