Vent

I am trying, really trying, to focus on the positive and not the negative. But sometimes, my friends, a girl just needs to bitch.

You know?

Do you have any idea how aggravating it is to have someone with a diagnosed mental condition, one symptom of which is narcissism, call you, have a perfectly normal conversation, and then call you back two minutes after you hang up to tell you how self-absorbed you are because you didn't ask that person whether he was doing okay? Despite the fact that when you do ask that question--and oh, believe me, you've asked it plenty--the answer is almost always something taciturn along the lines of "I'll live" and "No, you can't do anything to help"--or if it's a particularly bad episode, "What do you care?"

Pretty. Frigging. Aggravating!!!

And then. THEN! THEN!!!!

If you know that I have said no Effing PloyStation at my house because the child throws fits over it and I do not need to deal with that shite, then do NOT tell the child that he can have the EFFING PLOYSTATION at my house "if I say it's okay". And when I say "No" because he has used up his screentime, and he proceeds to have a total meltdown because of it (which, HELLO!, is the reason I won't let him have it here in the first place!), DO. NOT. CALL. ME. back in the middle of dealing with the child's nervous breakdown (and the nervous breakdown of his sister who cannot cope when her brother loses it) and start lecturing me about how I Need To Learn To Choose My Battles! Exclamation Point!!!! And how the child listens to you more than he listens to me and it's because I don't know how to "give a little".

People. You have no idea how PISSED OFF I am right now.

Deep breath. Okay.

And now I'm going to let that go. Thanks for listening.

Manifest destiny

Me: Oh my God! I manifested a CAR ACCIDENT!
Chica: What?!
Me: I kept telling the author that as he's the only one turning his stuff in on time, and every time I settle one issue with one author, another one freaks out on me and drops out, my greatest fear is that he'll get hit by a bus or something. And then he emailed us and said he was okay, but...HE GOT HIT BY A BUS!
Chica: NO!
Me: Well, no. It was a car. That rear ended him, and he's okay, but still! Crap!
Chica: That is kinda freaky.
Me: What I want to know is, I can manifest some guy getting hit by a bus, but I can't manifest a friggin' boyfriend? That just sucks.
Chica: If only you could use your powers for good!
Me: I know! Wait. I know what the problem is. I don't have anyone real to focus on, so I just wind up lusting after, like, Hugh Jackman or whatever, so my Jedi Powers are totally wasted. Somewhere in Australia, Hugh Jackman is saying, "I have this feeling that I need to be somewhere else..."
Chica: "...but I don't know why!"
Me: Exactly. I tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to manifest a bottle of vodka on my friggin' doorstep, is what I'm going to do. Otherwise, it's just a waste.
--------
And then she snuck by on her way to a dinner in town and left one on the front mat. Which is why she is the. best. friend. ever.

If your best friend leaves vodka on your doorstep because she knows you're trying to use the power of your mind to make one appear, does that still count?

Futuristic

Scene: Tucking the Girl into bed.

G: Mommy! Just ONE more hug and kiss!
Me: Okay, sweetie, one more.
G [draping herself around my neck]: I'm gonna give you hugs AWL the time! I will hug you at the mornin', an I will hug you at the night, an I will hug you downstairs, an I will hug you in the cawr, hugs all the time, for all the life!
Me: That would be great. Do you promise?
G: Yep!
Me: Even when you're a teenager?
G [thinking for a moment]: Only at the night.

Discovery

Dear Discover Card:

Um. I'm sure you worked awfully hard on your new ad campaign. But.

Flocks of jumping, snipping scissors do not make me happy. In fact, they make me feel distinctly UNhappy. Bordering on freaked out.

Where are you trying to go with this? Because if I walked outside and saw all those effing scissors? I would not be feeding them my credit cards. I would be hiding under my effing bed.

Please stop. Now.

-PK

Kind of on point...

Exactly my point. More or less.

Battles

Imagine that someone has dropped you--plop!--into the middle of us. Here's what you'll probably think:

My lord. Those children are riding roughshod over that woman!

At least, that's what I imagine people think, in my slightly embarassed and defensive imaginings. And uh, I guess it's sorta true. But when I start hearing you say that, in my head, then I end up acting like the Mama I don't like. The one who expects her children to be the Textbook Children Who Behave, In A Vaccum, And Are Just Like Little Grownups.

I'm really, really trying to keep remembering that those Children don't exist.

It's hard, because I think what happened is that people used to be able to pretend they existed, because back in the days when you'd get your hide tanned if you stepped out of line, kids were smarter about putting on the Nice Kid Skin around the grownups, and then doing the crazy stuff once they were alone with other kids. Which actually happened Back When--you actually had lots of time when you were just around the other kids, and could cut loose, and run around like maniacs and get all that energy out, and if you did something nutty, well, that's what kids did, and you might get a wupping but you wouldn't get sued by some other kid's parents or labeled a danger to society. But somewhere along the line, everything got all crazy. Now kids don't get smacked anymore (not that that's a bad thing, I'm kinda against the whole smacking thing myself) but they also don't get let out of an adult's sight for fear that they'll all be snatched away within the first 5 seconds that they're unsupervised. And if they mess up, well, there are worse things than getting spanked, and frankly I think the disdain of adults when you're just acting like a friggin' kid is one of them.

So. Yeah, my kids are pretty wild. Okay, they are SERIOUSLY wild. They have more energy than a nuclear power plant. Sometimes, they even (gasp) scream at each other. Or at me. And yeah, they get in trouble for it, so don't give me the fish eye if I don't spend every other second telling them to quit running around or keep their voices down. They aren't living without rules and consequences, believe me. I just don't want them to grow up with my voice in the back of their heads, telling them all the time that I got the wrong kids.

Deep thoughts

After contemplating the complex issues in life, here's what I think about:

Remember "The Kids from C.A.P.E.R."? From the 70s? Remember that episode where the aliens were disguised as hot dogs, and flew around on frisbies, and people would eat them, and then put ketchup and mustard and relish on their heads and sing the Weiner Song?

Come on, you know you do.

What do you mean, it isn't pronounced "mare"?

Wow. I did one of these a while back, but this one is ... uh ... Wow.
Did I ever mention how annoyed everyone used to get with me when we lived in England? Because I didn't have a "real" American accent and thus was no fun for teasing.
Thanks, Orange!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
The South
North Central
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Inland North
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Deception

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
-Mark 12:29-31

It seems to me, that if you hate yourself so much that you surround yourself with people and ideas that make it impossible to accept yourself the way you were made, with the result that you end up describing yourself as evil, fallen, and a deceiver because you couldn't maintain the lie that you made your life into just so you could deny something that you have no control over, that you're not getting the gist of those commandments. And that if you think that someone's sexuality is a bigger sin than the fact that your religion forces people into a corner in which they have to live a lie in order to feel worthy of your god's love? You aren't paying attention to your own Word.

Episode V

"You know what is SO gross? When Han Solo kisses Princess Leia!"
"EWWWW! I know! That is the GROSSEST thing EVER!"
"When Han Solo gets turned into carbonite..."
"YEAH!"
"THAT is soooo cool."

Here nor there

I remember the year I made the Boy a ghost costume out of long underwear and cheesecloth. And the year I made his scarecrow costume with newspaper stuffing and crinkly-paper straw. This year? 5:30 p.m. at the fly-by-night costume store and he's Harry Potter. And despite all my peer pressuring, he was accompanied by the Little Mermaid and her Gunky Red Hair That Is Not Really Red.

What I'm saying is, it was an excellent Halloween. The Boy ended up dividing all his candy into piles according to type, and then using them as a Lego obstacle course. The Girl put all hers in a plastic bag and then tried to hide behind the coffee table and eat them all.

Then they put about half the loot out for the Halloween Witch (who brought some nice erasers and so forth). And then I conked out on the Boy's bed after reading our chapter of Harry Potter.

Oh! OH! And get this! I was at the doctor's today, and they did the height/weight thing, and the nurse said, "Okay, 5'8 1/2," and I said, "Excuse me?" And she repeated my height, and I said, "Uh...no, I'm 5'7 1/2," and she said, "Want me to check it again?" and I said, "Yes, please" and guess what? I'm an inch taller than I thought I was. So, can I just say, how does that happen? How do I go my whole friggin' adult life thinking I'm an inch shorter than I actually am? I was ridiculously happy about it, for some reason. There's hope for me yet, as apparently I'm still growing.

No shit

Go read this, from Dr. B.

Curious Philosophy

Life lessons, gracie de Curious George:

"And the squirrel on his head was hungry..."

I think that kind of sums it all up, especially when stated by William H. Macy.

[Edited to correct the damned H. Thanks Trisha! You have saved me from a virtual eternity of looking like a dork! :) ]

A few things

Thank you. Really.

Better.

It's a start.

Think, thank, thunk

Well, crap.

I think The Depression is back.

I don't know. I don't want to jump the gun, and shit but I don't want to go back on those nice expensive drugs, but witness the telltale signs:

• Difficulty focusing on work
• Difficulty focusing on typical tasks
• Sleeping issues
• No appetite
• Fairly continuous feeling of anxiety
• Obsessing over really stupid shit
• Pretty much losing interest in pretty much everything

Aaaand we're coming up on a good 3 or 4 weeks here.

So.

There are still some non-medical things I haven't really put into full effect yet; I need to dig out the info I kept from my sessions last year, make specific times to get more exercise, plan out the diet better, blah blah blah. But. But.

There are some things in my head that make me sad right now. That's all, I guess.

Conversations from Bizarro World

The kids are watching "Dragon Tales"; I call them away for breakfast just as Max and Emmi are finishing their little dragon scale rhyme.

The Girl: EWWWWWW! GROSS!
The Boy and me: ?
TG: I don wanna fy with dagons in a lan uv BARF!

-------------------

Phone call with the Ex:

Ex: You need somebody extremely smart.
Me: I would settle for middling smart, even, at this point.
Ex: Well, I think he's gonna hafta be smart.
Me: Fine.
Ex: And I would say, pretty refined.
Me: Well, I don't know. I mean, I don't want somebody who's going to be going all esoteric on me all the time.
Ex: You know what you need? You need to date...
Me: A professor.
Ex: That's exactly what I was thinking!
Me: It'd do.
Ex: How old?
Me: I'm wide open. Any birthdate between 1960 and 1978.
Ex: 1978?
Me: I told you, I'm approaching desperation here!
Ex: That's like, what, how old is that?
Me: Ten years. That's the most I could stand.
Ex: What, you want to get them right out of college?
Me: SHUT UP! I said that was the Outer Limit. It isn't my preference!!
Ex: I think it's a little young, though.
Me: Well, so do I, I'm just saying that--HEY! Pot calling Kettle!!
Ex: I'd say somewhere between 40 and 45.
Me: That would certainly be my preference, but I'm like the choosy beggar here, dude.
Ex: An accent would be pretty good. Like maybe a British accent.
Me: Oh, sure, why not. Throw that in.
Ex: Like Hugh Grant.
Me: ??!! Hugh Grant?? Dear god, no. Try Collin Firth.
Ex: Who's that?
Me: You know, from Nanny McFee.
Ex: Oh, no way! He's a wus. Even Hugh Grant knocked him out.
Me: Shut up! He's a total sweetie! I am NOT dating Hugh Grant. Yuck!
Ex: No, you need a fighter.
Me: Uh, I think not. I can fight for myself, thanks. What I need is somebody who isn't all stressed out all the time.
Ex: Good luck with that.
Me: Yeah, yeah, I know.
Ex: All right, I'm on it.
Me: Good. Go. Find.

Why Sesame Street rocks...

Amy Sedaris is the guest on the street today. 'Nuff said.

Cry me a river

I've got a runner. This is what happens: The Boy messes up. And he realizes it. And he blurts out that he's sorry, gets a total panicked look on his face, and then takes off. Literally. Running. And then you either have to chase after him or ignore him until he comes back.

So on the one hand, this is a way to take the pressure off. I get that. He runs off, people come after him, and it isn't about how he's in trouble anymore. So I say to him, "Buddy. You've got to stop running away from stuff. You've got to stay and face up to it."

"But I'm just not that type of person!" he wails from downstairs (where yes, he'd run away to).

"What type of person is that?" I ask.

"The good type of person!" he sniffs. "I'm the other type of person! I'm the bad bad bad type of person!"

Oy vey.

No, I tell him, you aren't. But why do you run off? If you run off, you can't resolve the situation. I give him some examples of times he's run off so fast that he hasn't given the other person the chance to tell him it's okay and they aren't even upset. "But," he says, "I have to run away. Because I feel bad. And then I feel like crying." The tears start squeezing out of the corners of his eyes. "And I can't cry! I run away so no one will see me cry, because I can't help it, and only babies cry! And I don't want to be a baby! Everyone will know that I'm a baby!" He's crying really hard now, and covering up his head with the covers.

Where did this come from? Damn this American Man Shit. But I don't know, and he won't or can't tell me, where or from whom in particular this notion has come.

"That's completely not true," I insist. "I cry all the time."

"No you don't," comes the muffled response. "You never cry."

So much for all those sleepless nights thinking I'd scarred my kids crying while I was making dinner or reading them stories or wiping their butts. Hmm.

"Parents usually try not to cry in front of their kids, honey, because they don't want to upset them."

"Well it wouldn't upset me! It would just show me that it's okay!"

So I promised him I would cry more if he would promise to think about the fact that crying was actually something that everybody was made to do, and that it was good for you, and that if you never cried you couldn't get out the sad stuff. I am baffled.

Sundry

I've been rather short with the Girl lately, and I don't like it.

But let me first say, and I know this is eye-rolling-worthy, but it's absolutely true: You have No. Idea. how cute she is. I mean, the kid is Cute (tm). In fact, every interaction with pretty much every adult, in passing or otherwise, ends with them saying, "Ohhhhhh, she's so cute!"

This is getting dangerous. I mean, she gets away with shite (away from home) because of The Cuteness. Which is not a message we want to send to her little brain. Because you send that message, the next thing you know you get not just The Cute, but you get The Bratty. Not good.

Anyway, though, I am being too short with her, and that's not good. You know that thing where you hear your voice coming out of your body, and it's the Voice of Criticism? I don't like that voice.

Last week, a client actually said to me, "You know what your special gift in this world is? You are so calm! You can stay so calm and keep everyone else calm...it's amazing." And boy, did I get a good laugh outta that one. Hooboy.

We'll probably get our first snow today. S gave me an piece of extra carpeting she didn't want, and I put it in the basement, so we now have Unfinished Basement Playroom, complete with $5 Home De(s)pot painted concrete walls (sadly, they look a bit institutional, but can painted concrete ever not? I think I need to buy some funky spraypaint and get abstract), carpet-remnant carpeting, futon, blackboard painted-art table (formerly the second-hand table the Ex and I acquired when we first got hitched) and chairs, and all the toys and art stuff. I am ready to deal with Kids Stuck Indoors.

Approaching normalcy

Which is to say, pretty much back in the saddle. I'm wondering if last week's Mood Swing Bonanza was my bod's new middle-age reaction to stress? I realized on Saturday that the way I was feeling was pretty much exactly how I had felt (increasingly) for the year leading up to my stint on Lexapro. If you'll recall, that fun Depressive Episode exhibited itself much more as anxiety and high emotion than as mopey moping. And said depression was generally agreed (by the docs) to be caused by stress. So. Maybe a promotion, the ex's breakup with his fiance, and a disagreement with the landscaper was enough stress to throw me into a bit of a tailspin. Possibly.

Kind of along the lines of the way I work (in an overall sense), as soon as I realized this, I started feeling better. Although I still am not exactly pleased about where I am life-strategy-coping-wise, I do feel more myself this week. I think I can say that other than eating a half pan of rice krispie treats (damn their marshmallowy goodness!), things are coming around. I've actually managed to accomplish a few tasks around the house and on the job, as well as put some increased exercise into the schedule, and I think I'm going to pony up and go back on the Weight Watchers for a month (I'd gotten cheap and gone off it as I wasn't really following it very well, but now that I'm exercising more I have the bad feeling I'm also noshing more, which doesn't exactly equate with the goal of losing weight). If The Anxious comes back or seems to be lurking around after a few more weeks, I'll ask the doc about it; it's about time for my annual prodding anyway, and I should have my cholesterol and all that crap checked as well.

On a completely non-related subject, the Boy was wondering what instrument he might learn to play. The piano seemed a logical choice, seeing as how we have one, and I also pointed out to him that "Chicks dig a guy who plays the piano." "What?" he said, doing that eyebrow thing we in this family do so well, "Chicks dig? What does that mean?" And when I explained, "EWWWWW!! Mo-om! No way am I playing the piano, then." And then he started giggling.

And here's something that I have to write down so I never forget how cute it is to me: The Girl pointing out that there's "none more". "Only one more, Mama! Ohoh, now none more. There's just none more for you, sorry!"