My Blah Blah Blog

While Hulu-surfing last night I heard a character on “Parks and Recreation say, “When God gives you lemons, make lemonade.” This was weird, because I had just made lemonade from backyard lemons.

In doing so, I’d been reminded of how often I’d given the lemonade advice to my daughters (although I’d left out the ‘God’ part), trying to teach them about making a good situaion out of a bad one. So, after making the actual lemonade, I had resolved to do it figuratively, to follow my own advice for a big fat change.

For example, Lemon #1: I was having an exceptionally bad hair day, due to the raint—a frizz festival. Here’s the lemonade I made out of it: Instead of beating my hair into submission with a straightening tool, I embraced the killer humidity and went full curl. I found that if I avoided mirrors, I could spend hours happily thinking I looked like Bernadette Peters.

Then there’s Lemon #2. I dropped and broke the gorgeous Simon Pearce glass pitcher I had planned to fill with lemonade to serve at my garden party for the mahjong group.
Lemonade: The pitcher was a wedding present from a friend-turned-bitch (who, I’m told,  said something rude about my carpeting behind my back) so the hell with the pitcher (and with the bitch).

Lemon #3: Apparently traumatized by bad weather, a massive ficus tree fell in our back yard, crushing Tom’s basketball hoop (and narrowly missing the dog).
Lemonade: I was temporarily spared the irritating boing-boing sound of Tom channeling Kobe and we now have enough firewood for the entire winter (which seems to be occurring in May this year).

Lemon #4: It’s pouring rain with sub-60 temperatures and there’s a tree in the yard and my mahjong group are about to show up for a garden party, complete with hats to rival the Royal Family’s.
Lemonade: I built them a fire thanks to the wood from Lemon #3. Then I put tulips on the coffee table so we could pretend we were in the garden, the illusion sustained by that big splash of vodka I dumped in the actual lemonade I’d made earlier.

Lemon #5: Sparks from the soggy firewood set the carpet on fire.
Lemonade: Luckily I have actual (vodka) lemonade handy to douse the fire and I never liked that damn carpet anyway (which apparently puts me smack on the same page as the pitcher bitch from Lemon #2).

At day’s end, just as I glued myself to Hulu, hoping for a lemon-free hour, my daughter called to tell us weepily that it was likely to rain heavily all over her imminent college graduation. This was a perfect opening for the lemonade lecture.

“Aw, honey,” I said. “That just sucks.”