Sometimes when I’m trying to tell a story about my family, I get interrupted by people asking, “Wait, your brother’s named WHAT?” and, “Hang on- that’s your sister’s name? What’s your other brother’s name?” and the like. It’s incredibly disruptive and the object of people’s curiosity is something I’ve been trying to downplay for years, as it’s, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, horribly embarrassing.
My not-so-secret secret?

*sigh*
If you must.

The names and pecking order of my parents’ spawn is as follows:
Peter
Paul
Pamela
Paula

Ha ha ha, yes, it’s hilarious, isn’t it? What were they thinking? Oh, ho ho ho.
Right. My whole conscious life I’ve been trying to avoid using my siblings’ names in conversation, lest suffer the inevitable, “Why aren’t you named ‘Mary?’” and hilarious questions of the sort. My parents said they didn’t plan to have us all have “P” names until they got to me, the fourth. At that point, they said, they didn’t want to disrupt the pattern.
Whoopee.

Even stranger, though, is that my brother, Paul, married a woman who has suffered the same fate! Her name is Karen, and her siblings are Kurt, Craig, Courtney, Kristen, and Kevin. (Yeah, they’re Cs and Ks, but they all have the same hard consonant sound.) Oh, and their given surname is Collins. Heh heh.

And THEN…

I dated four guys named Matt. All in a row. (One of them had a sister named Paula, one’s middle name was Paul.)
I married a fellow named Aaron, much to my relief. But…wait…not only is his middle name also Paul, but he has a brother Matt who married a woman named PAULA!!!! AAAAAGH!!!!!1111
Thank GOD I never planned on changing my surname.
The gist of this is preemptive. For, hopefully in the future, if you find yourself conversing with me about my family, you’ll have laughed at me already and saved me from potential embarrassment and/or hating you.

Thank you.

I mean, REALLY. In the last two days, I’ve been abjectly insulted by two nincompoops on Twitter. One fucker was up my ass for “violating” the “rules” of a hashtag joke. I mean, for real? Who gives a flying rat? At first I thought he was joking, but he did it two days in a row, and the more shit I gave him for being the “hall monitor” and “the hashtag police” the more he got pissed off. How INANE is that? Then he proceeded to call a friend of mine and me “ignorant” and “unaware of history” because we called him the hashtag gestapo. For chrissake. I was a history major.

You wanna know what I said on Twitter that started this whole fucking thing?

Okay.

The hashtag was #replacebrandnameswithPenis. I know, it’s stupid. But I played, of course, because PENIS is funny. My contribution was “Barbie’s Dream Penis.” Ha ha ha, right? This bag of asshair chimed in and said, “‘Barbie’ is the brand. Barbie’s Dream Car is a PRODUCT. ” OOOOH! Boy, did I fuck up! For SHAME! (Also, I meant “Barbie’s Dream House. DUH.) This, THIS, escalated to the point where he implied I was anti-Semitic and ignorant. Um…

Asshole #2 called me a dumbass. Yeah. He said something sarcastic about Miley Cyrus’s alleged meth use. I replied, expounding on the joke. Well, I thought I was, anyway. I get this reply from him: “I was obviously being sarcastic. Dumbass.” WHAT? So I give him, “I was making a joke, too. Don’t fucking call me a dumbass, because then I’ll have to call you a scrotum huffer.” You know, I was trying to lighten the mood. Who wouldn’t laugh at “scrotum huffer?”

THIS GUY! His volley was, “You’re a dumbass. Nothing what you said could be anyway used as a joke.” Nice dick-tion, by the way, ass.

Me: “You are a halfwit, as you didn’t get it. I’m many things: pedantic, obstinate, irascible- but never a dumbass, you imbecile.”

He had no reply to this, but proceeded to body-snark one of my friends who was defending me. So I called him a poseur with a bad beard. And he called me a fat, ugly cunt. I’m actually laughing whilst writing this.

What is WITH people? Did they get atomic wedgies before logging on?

One can only hope…

I wouldn’t consider myself a poet, but as I have been writing songs for the greater part of my life, one could say that I am.  A lyricist is just a poet who happens to put their words to song, right? Well, with exceptions…

Anyway, this year I’ve delved more into writing sans song (though I still do that, as it’s my job…) and some of the results have been not-awful. I participated in NaNoWriMo, and though I didn’t “win,” (“Winning is for sissies.” – Patti Digh) I managed to eek out over 20,000 words while maintaining my deadlines for clients. I want to finish this novel. Hell knows when, but I like the premise- it’s a satire called “Obituary Queen,” and there’s a sociopath and a cult leader and all sorts of assholes in there. I also wrote a…(OMG!)…SEX SCENE!!!! SEX! AAAAGH! I’ve never come close to doing THAT before.  I’ll likely be posting excerpts here. I’ll consider it my own, lower-brow, New Yorker.

For now, I have this poem.

The Ugliest Girl in the World

I’m the ugliest girl in the world
I hide on the outside
With make up
With curls
When I’m thin people like me
Congratulations!
What an achievement
For abandoning myself
When I’m fat, people like me
Ugliness peeks through
So witty!
So smart!
So talented!
Thank god she’s fat!
In between
Mother says with mother bias
What a pretty face
Father says with male bias
I’m an 8 out of 10
Thanks, Dad
Lovers know what I want to hear
But won’t say
It will seem false
It will be false
After all
I am the ugliest girl in the world

Lovers compliment others
Words never said to me
For I am ugly
If I had the right kind of knife
I’d carve an X into my face
Diagonal
Right to left
Diagonal
Left to right
X-ed out
Then there would be no question
It’s the wondering that kills me

Maybe, maybe it doesn’t matter
Maybe, maybe I’m pretty
This woman lives in me, somewhere
Battling my ugly
Battered by my ugly
In me, two people who despise each other
No one sees my wounds
Agonizing wars, bitches brawl
If I had the right kind of knife
I’d cut them right out of my chest
Leaving a void
Where the pain was
A void
My ugly pain
MY ugly
Where would I be without my ugly?

I found and old school notebook when I was at my parents’ house last month. Judging from the stickers on the cover, it’s from the fourth or fifth grade. In addition to a billion drawings of me and my friend Dinah on our ponies (yes, we really did have ponies, it wasn’t a “crazy girl who always asks for a pony and has horsey everything in her bedroom” situation), I found some long division and basic algebra, some top 40 lists (I’d write down the songs from American Top Forty every Saturday morning for about five years.), and…

A terrible, but disturbing poem, by Paula A. Kelley, age 10:

There was a girl called Mary-Lou
And very poor was she
Between her and her family
Was just $3.33

The little food they had
Was saved up in a small tin can
And when the can was full
They ate it from a frying pan

Mary-Lou was weak and frail
She couldn’t get much thinner
She would have given both her legs
For one well-balanced dinner

One night that sneaky little wench
Snuck in the butcher shop
And stole each roast without a boast
And every last lamb-chop

Her family was in their glory
Prancing ’round the room
Their little home no longer was
The dominance of gloom

They feasted well around the clock
Their jaws a-chomipin madly
But when they finished they were
Gushing tears our just as sadly

What? Whaaat? I can’t even remember writing this (Why would I?) but what kind of state must I have been in? “Sneaky little wench?” “Dominance of gloom?” Did I think that made any sense?
But the surprise “tragic” ending sparked my memory; I do remember this as being something I would incorporate in many an elementary writing. I don’t think this was a school assignment, as it’s scrawled on a page with no name or date, and it has some messy crossings-out and writings-over. I had an unhappy home life as a tyke (long story, like most of us, I suppose), but I didn’t realize how obviously it manifested itself in my creative endeavors.

I also found this:

Guide to Doing Homework
by Paula A. Kelley, age 10

If you need help doing homework, if you can’t take the long hours of labor and toil, if you are so sick of homework you could just barf on every page, there’s only one solution to your problems!
DON’T DO IT!!!

If you have easy teachers, here is a list of excuses:

1. Your dandruff flake ate it.
2. Your little brother couldn’t control himself and went on it.
3. It had little homework papers and had to stay home and take care of them.
4. It blew into the bathroom and your mother flushed it down the toilet.

If you have hard teachers, you can
do this:

Scribble on a piece of paper. Bring it in and say that it’s your homework. Rip it up and say,
“WHOOPS!” after each tear. (Make sure you do this in front of the teacher so you won’t need an excuse.) If they make you do it again, sneak out of that class.
Simple as that!

Okay, so my comedy career had a slow start. “What comedy career?” you may ask. I’m asking the same thing. Anyway, I was so quiet at that age, and I got such good grades, everyone thought I was a goody-goody. Little did they know I had such evil, subversive plans to flagrantly hoodwink teachers so as to get out of doing homework! What a sneaky little wench I was!

Oh…

Why the hell am I sharing this dreck with you? Because I LOVE you. That’s right. I’m talking to YOU.
xoxoxox

PK