I Eat Foot

I haven’t heard from my sister-in-law, Shelley, since her birthday and I’m a little worried she thinks I’ve been a cock.

I have a history of putting my foot in my mouth and chewing. Usually this has been because I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea and I’ve been so exhausted I can’t keep up with conversations.

Or worse, my brain starts to slowly disclose ideas associated with the person I’m talking to, leaving out the bit ‘don’t bring this up’ until after I’ve made some sort of enquiry.

At which point I’d chew on shoe and try to pretend it was a joke. In fact, I got really, really good at putting on a dumb face and drawing out the laugh.

I’m not saying this doesn’t happen anymore, but at least it’s not a daily thing and I’m not serving customers at work.

On the other hand, it seems I can still manage to tickle my tonsils with my toes even with a decent night’s sleep.

“Come on, kids,” I called out. “We have to phone Auntie Shelley for her birthday.”

Even as we gathered in my parent’s kitchen and I pulled up Shell’s details on my phone, the conversations continued. Master12 was discussing the finer points of his new 3DS game with his siblings and I was continuing to rant on about a woman Tracey and I crossed paths with in town that day who decided, for some reason, to tell us the people of Gympie were inferior to every person everywhere else in terms of education, class and general niceness.

You can imagine how well that went over with us.

What I’d like you to also imagine is my sister-in-law’s face when playing back the birthday message on her phone from us. Not the usual rendition of Happy Birthday, because I was still waiting for the phone to signal it was ringing, let alone gone to message bank. Instead she got a message I didn’t know I was sending because somehow I was recording a soundbite which my phone quickly texted off to her (the app has a green icon with a white speech bubble??)

God, I HATE technology. I suck at it so bad.

Unfortunately my sister-in-law can only assume, because she can’t quite hear the person in the background asking me why the woman in question we’d been discussing doesn’t like Gympie, that I’m talking about her when I say:

“Probably because she’s a farkin cow and no one likes her!”

Shelley, if you’re reading this, please believe I absolutely, positively, without a doubt and honestly wasn’t talking about you.

Oh, and happy birthday. Hope you had a great day.

Raising a family on little more than laughs