Let's Call It A Hiatus...

...it sounds fancier than what has really kept me away from this place for so long which is that I've been buried under the demands of daily life while at the same time finding myself in a Funk.

Yes, that's a capital "F" you see there and it's a much-warranted one if you ask me--not that you can really trust the judgement of a person in a capital-F Funk since the funkiness tends to distort your perception when you're deep in the Funk. The thing about capital-F Funks is that some people completely understand the difference between a capital-F Funk and a regular run-of-the-mill down-in-the-dumps kind of funk and some people truly don't.

At a family gathering, in response to a question about why I hadn't been better about keeping in touch for the past year or so,* I said, "Don't take it personally, I've just been in a Funk**, a deep, dark Funk."

To which the person replied, "That happens to me sometimes, but then I realize I'm still alive and I just get over it."

And another person listening from across the room said, "That happens to me sometimes and I just take Prozac until it goes away. Want a Prozac?"

It's clear to see that one of these people gets it--even though I wasn't going to accept her generously offered Prozac--and one of these people doesn't. And when you're in a capital-F Funk, the advice of the people who don't get it rubs against the soft parts of your soul like someone rubbing Ajax on your forehead.***

While I suffer from the lower-case-f funk from time to time, as many of us do, the colossal capital-F Funk has plagued me much less often, but has hung around a lot longer when it arrives. Sometimes it is precipitated by life events--in this case primarily a housing situation that would make shacking up in one of the anterooms of Hell sound rather appealing--and sometimes it just comes upon me and makes everything in my life seem infinitely worse than it actually is. Sometimes I have taken whatever pharmaceutical remedies were thought useful by my nurse practitioner and felt a gradual easing of the Funk, but the results I got from the pharmaceuticals were rarely worth the cost of the side effects I suffered--and sometimes I have just ridden it out until it began to gradually lessen of its own accord. Sometimes the easing came about as a direct result of a positive change in external circumstances and sometimes the easing came about as the more mysterious result of rediscovering inner reserves of tolerance and strength with which to better face the circumstances.

At the moment, I remain pretty firmly in the grip of the current Funk but it occurred to me this morning that not writing on my blog and not writing in my notebooks and not making more of an effort, is certainly not helping anything.

So here I am--Funky as all get-out--but making an effort.

*This is not intended to imply that in non-Funk times I am all that good at keeping in touch. For most of the past ten years, I've been kind of crappy at it. Funk has made it go from half-assed sporadic contact to no self-initiated contact at all. I do still try to respond appropriately when someone contacts me, but I have not reached out in any direction since being overcome by the Funk.

**Capital-F implied.

***Ah, who the hell am I kidding, while under the spell of the funk, just about any advice is annoying as crap.

Words of Wisdom From An Unlikely Source

It's not just a slogan on my blog header: Wisdom really can sneak up on you when you least expect it. In a conversation which also included onion rings, Easter goats, pedophilia, and see-saws, for example.

Riding around the other day with Daughter-Only and a friend of hers when Daughter-Only (who, please note, has a sixteenth birthday just around the corner) announces, in what can only be called an accusing manner, "Mommy, I have to go potty!"

I say, "I'm not sure how that can possibly be construed as my fault."

She says, "Everything that happens to me is your fault because it's your fault I was born."

I take a second of silence to digest this tidbit and then say, "So wait, do I get credit for all the good stuff that happens to you?"

She says, without hesitation, "No, it doesn't work that way."

I start to protest and she cuts me off with "Life's not fair, Mom. Get over it."

42

"And I thought, I'll always remember that we die. I'll live like I believe in our mortality, like I believe in death. But of course it isn't that easy. Mortality is like a bad dream we kindly let ourselves forget and every now and then something reminds us, but then we forget again." ~~Alison Clement

A friend called me one day last week to tell me that a mutual acquaintance--a person we know of more than actually know, a local business owner--suffered what turned out to be an aortic dissecton during a rigorous exercise routine. This was a routine she had been doing for a while now, apparently, and to all outward signs this woman was in enviable physical health. On this day, though, she collapsed mid-routine--her heart had stopped, but they were able to resucitate her and she was rushed into emergency surgery. Even if she managed to survive the surgery--and the ones that would probably follow it--there were concerns that she had been without oxygen long enough to do permanent damage to her brain.

My friend texted a few days later to tell me the woman didn't make it. She was 42.

My friend and I had that conversation people always have when something like this happens--especially when it happens close by you, but distant enough for you to be philosophical rather than simply devastated. We talked about how you just never know, that you could wake up one day this week or next year or whatever and it could be the last day you wake up and how when something like this happens we always think we're going to live our lives a different way: grateful for the time we are given and determined to use it wisely and to the fullest extent. And how we keep it in mind for a few days, a week if we're lucky, and then all the mundane crap of normal life buries us once again and we go about our lives blissfully--maybe even willfully-- ignorant of our mortality. We tell ourselves that we understand that there are no guarantees in life, but we don't really get it on anything but a superficial, intellectual level.

My mother was also 42 when she died, but it didn't happen as suddenly as in this case. There were whisperings and rumblings and close calls for years before, beginning with the lump she found a few months before her thirty-sixth birthday. I remember sitting in her living room, just the two of us, watching afternoon TV--me on the couch, her on the recliner with her feet propped up--oh-so-casual as though there was nothing to be concerned about--describing the lump as "pea-sized" and, as if to further impress upon me that there was nothing to worry about, she said she was waiting until after the first of the year to have it checked out. It was mid-December then; by mid-March she had had a modified radical mastectomy. The cancer appeared to have been caught early with no lymph node involvement and the decision regarding chemo and radiation was left pretty much up to her.

From her time in Walter Reed medical center, she brought home the surgical scars and a kind of battle-weary air that I had never noticed before, though perhaps it had been there all along--she'd certainly faced down an enemy or two before the cancer. She also brought home the story of a woman she met on the cancer ward. This woman had been given less than a year to live and people kept asking her how she intended to spend what quality time she had left--would she travel the world, would she spend extravagantly on things she'd always denied herself, would she sell her house and rent a Winnebago and follow a carnival around the country? What last-minute changes and last-ditch efforts would she make in her life?

For this woman, the answer turned out to be that she intended to return to her home and her life, exactly as it was and go about living it exactly as she had been and savoring every single precious imperfect moment of it. All those things she might have dreamed of doing someday were not as important to her as the things she had done in her life--I imagine she understood, even if she did not say so, that her life as it was was the truest reflection of the unique combination of the aspirations and disappointments, the striving and compromises that made her who she was. Rather than hungering for extraordinary moments, she was greedy for more of those ordinary moments that accumulate in all our lives sometimes barely noticed, but in the end are really what make life worthwhile.

Sometimes when I hear the Tim McGraw song "Live Like You Were Dyin'," I think of the woman from Walter Reed, and of course I think of my mother, too, who embraced that woman's philosophy right up to the end of her own life in ways I would only understand much later. The song is about a man who faces a medical crisis which brings his mortality into clear focus. It's partly about how he went "sky divin'" and "Rocky Mountain climbin'" and " two-point-seven seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu." (Or as I belted out during one especially sleep-deprived round of Off-Key Car Sing-Along: "I went two-point-seven seconds on a fool named Bu Manchu" which, one would imagine, would be a whole other kind of extraordinary experience. One which neither you nor the fool would likely forget.) Those are the extraordinary moments, but it's also--and more importantly--about how he "loved deeper," "spoke sweeter," and "gave forgiveness" he'd been denying. It's about living an ordinary life with extraordinary appreciation and attention to detail.

And when a 42-year-old woman in excellent health is swept from her life in an instant, it reminds me (yet again) that the difference between a life well-lived and a life barely-lived lies not in the specifics (bull riding vs. toddler wrangling, for example) but in our appreciation of them. Perhaps it is too much to hope that I will use my time wisely (I am, like most of us, capable of wisdom in short bursts but unlikely to sustain it with any sort of consistency), but maybe I can remember to use my time gratefully, in ways that are truest to who I am.

At least for a little while.

Kiss My Dupa

When I was growing up, spending time with my paternal grandparents, Pap had a habit of sitting in a chair in the corner of the kitchen beside the woodstove, sometimes reading, sometimes just sitting there over his ridiculously strong cup of tea, looking curmudgeonly--he had more hair and fewer teeth but otherwise resembled Nebbercracker from the movie Monster House in some significant ways. I know Nebbercracker was supposed to be a scary bad guy, especially at the beginning, but I found myself a little nostalgic and missing Pap even in the opening scenes of the movie.

Anyway, there he sat, in the chair in the corner of the kitchen and Nan was often puttering around the house or watching TV in the living room. The house was a converted hunting cabin and had only three rooms so when he yelled for her, in his phlegmy, grunty way (emphysema), she wouldn't have any problem hearing him.

"Em," he would yell, and then pause for a response, which wouldn't come, so he'd yell again.

"Em!"

"Em!"

"Emma!"

Meanwhile, my grandmother was wherever she was smirking and rolling her eyes, knowing what was coming, and not answering because of it.

"Em!"

"Em!"

"Emma!"

This would sometimes go on for three or four rounds before finally, finally Nan would cave and say, "What?!" or sometimes (if this was, say, the third or fourth time that day that Pap had gotten into this mood), "What, you crazy old son-of-a-bitch?!"

And always, always, always, Pap would say, "Kiss my dupa*!" He was a sixty-something-year-old man with a six-year-old's mischievous glint in his eye. Sometimes--even if it was the fourth or fifth time that day he'd pulled his clever little trick--he would laugh so hard a coughing fit would ensue.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately--not merely because it's the kind of funny-in-a-warped way story that is so typical of my grandparents--but because in my own funny-in-a-warped way brain, it's become a metaphor for my entire life.
There are some things about myself and my life that I would really like to change. I would like to be more motivated and energetic and I understand that the main way to get moving is to actually move. I want to spend less energy procrastinating and more energy actually accomplishing. I lecture myself pretty much perpetually. The last ten minutes before I fall asleep, many of my thoughts begin with "First thing tomorrow, I will..." and yet day after day after month after year, not much changes.
So there is the lecturing side of myself--the well-intentioned, you-can-do-more-better-faster self but then there is the other side, sitting in the corner, clamoring for attention. ("Em!" "Em!" "Emma!") And that more-better-faster person tries nobly to resist the pull of the non-productive, unhealthy, but oh-so-deeply-ingrained creature of slothful habits, but finally, finally, always, always she gives in and shouts, "What, you crazy old son-of-a-bitch?!"

*Growing up, I knew "dupa" was "ass" and just assumed it was German, given my grandfather's heritage. But, turns out, if it is German it is regional slang borrowed from one of several Eastern European neighbors.

Incident Report

Rushing around at work the other day, I bent down to get into the car and bashed my lip off the corner of the car door. It hurt so bad that even typing that two days later makes my eyes water a little. The corner pierced my lip and there was blood and swelling and bruising. I walked through the house past the guys and my coworkers with my hands cupped under my mouth, trying to catch the blood, unable to answer their, "Are you all right?"'s.

Once the bleeding was under control and ice was applied, a sympathetic coworker pointed out, "You're going to have to fill out an incident report."

And I said, "No way. What am I supposed to write on it, 'I was an idiot.'? That's not an incident; that's a chronic condition."

PS--I eventually did fill out an incident report, in case, as the ever-helpful coworker suggested, "it becomes infected and your face falls off."

If It's Not On The Internet, It Doesn't Exist & Other Things I've Learned--Mostly About The Internet

1. The website for Dick's Sporting Goods is NOT dicks dot com.*

2. A friend recently joined Facebook and texted me a few hours later: "I just found the girl who told me in 8th grade that my legs looked like sausage links." Just think, before the internet, we only had the echoes in our heads and hearts to remind us of all those great moments from middle school.

3. Judging from his effect on my teenaged daughter and her friends, Bo Burnham, has embedded subliminal hypnotic messages in his YouTube videos.

4. During a conversation too complicated and, well, boring, to repeat here, Hubby said, in defense of a point he was trying to make, "There is not a book that has been published that is not referenced somewhere on the internet."

At first, I thought (and said), "Wow! Seriously? You really believe that every single book ever written is mentioned somewhere on the internet?" It's absurd, right? I mean some dude in 1465 borrowed money from his brother-in-law to print 100 copies of his collected love poems and one of those copies somehow survived and was read by GeekyBookDude786 who posted about it on his blog, right? And that happened for every single book ever published?


And, then I thought, surely he's exaggerating for emphasis. But, no, turns out, he really, really means every book published is mentioned somewhere on the internet. (Later, he did admit that he would not include "some book written by some guy in a hut in 1357 or whatever" but stood by the basic principle.)


We finally agreed to disagree on the subject (a euphemism for getting sick of telling each other to shut the hell up) but just before that breaking point he said those immortal words (you'll recognize them from every argument you've had since third grade): "Prove it."

And that's when it hit me that the argument which had on its surface seemed so ridiculous and simple-minded was, in fact, quite diabolical in its brilliance. When he said, "Prove it," I thought, "No problem. I'll just go to the library basement, grab the dustiest, most obscure book I can find and Google it." Great! Except...the Google search would return (even if nothing else) the card catalog listing of the damn book. And as certain as I am that there were lots and lots of books written and published over the centuries that aren't mentioned online, I would have no idea what any of them might be named (and this is the most delicious part) because they're not listed online.

*Similarly, if you want a recipe for popcorn balls, I don't suggest indiscriminately clicking any old link that pops (ha ha, get it?) up when you Google "popcorn balls." And, in the never-would've-seen-that-one coming (ha ha, get it?) department (with thanks to Youngest Sister and her husband, Lou B.) the phrase "feeding the ducks" will yield more from your search engine than information on sustenance for the abandoned duckling you found on the golf course near your house.

The Essence of Parenting Teenagers In One Brief(ish) Blog Post

For over a year now, Daughter-Only has been campaigning to have her nose pierced. Hubby and I have never given her an absolutely-not-young-lady speech but we've counseled caution and told her to wait a while and she has (for the most part) patiently waited until the last month or so when she began the all-out pestering. She went so far as to say that the piercing was all she wanted for Christmas*.

For a variety of reasons--mostly scheduling and finance-related issues--she did not get pierced for Christmas. But I did agree that we would do it as soon as possible after the holidays.

It was not without trepidation that I agreed to take her to the highly recommended piercing place today but I convinced myself that she was mature enough to make this decision. She's reasonably responsible; she researched her decision thoroughly; she made the phone call to check what arrangements were necessary for a fifteen-year-old girl to get her nose pierced in the fine state of New York.

So off we went, driving half an hour over snow-covered roads to get to this highly recommended (and hopefully hepatitis-free) piercing place. We showed our identification and signed the necessary papers and paid the fee then sat down to wait our turn with the piercing professional.

It was only then that I noticed Daughter-Only was wearing flip-flops. Flip-flops. In twelve-degree weather.



*Oh, and her hair cut at a pricey salon in town. And, um, some clothes but they don't count because, uh, she needs* clothes anyway.

*When my children (and, alas, even my husband) wantonly throw around the word "need," I am prone to saying, "What you need is a dictionary to look up the word 'need.'" You would think after a certain number of years of this remark, they would be a little more careful with their word usage. But so far, no luck.

A Little Willing Suspension of Disbelief Goes A Long Way

The Christmas I was nine, I had pretty much given up on the idea of Santa. It's strange to me that I had not given up on it sooner--I was, after all, the kid who couldn't sit through the Wizard of Oz without harping on the fact that it would've been impossible for all those "people" who'd never met--Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion--to know all the words to the song "We're Off To See The Wizard." On the other hand, I did not seem to have much trouble accepting a talking Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion or, for that matter, a green-faced Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys so perhaps it's not so odd after all.


In any case, I didn't quite NOT believe in Santa but mostly that was the same kind of bet-hedging I imagine many on-the-fence agnostics indulge in--better not to say out loud, "There is no Santa" just in case there is one and he might be offended and vengeful at my disbelief.

So Little Sister and I were in the bedroom we shared, awake late, too excited to sleep, wondering aloud about the surprises there might be under the tree, just generally being kids on Christmas Eve. At some point--and I'm not sure if she was still awake or not--there came the sound of tinkling bells.

They were sleigh bells, of course. No other logical explanation could be found in my wanting-to-believe brain. And that sealed the deal on at least six more months of being right around 85% certain that Santa Claus not only existed but did in fact fly around the world in a sleigh pulled by bell-bedecked reindeer.

By the following Christmas, I no longer believed and I can't remember exactly what compelling evidence pushed me to non-believer status, but there was always this weird nagging doubt in the back of my mind--"What about those sleigh bells?"

Three years or so after I heard those sleigh bells, I was digging for dimes in the desk drawer where my father sometimes threw his pocket change and came across a photo of him with the box of the pinball machine we had found under the tree the Christmas morning I was nine and suddenly those sleigh bells made a lot more sense. It hadn't been a sleigh landing on the roof, it had been my father test-driving the pinball machine.

Thirty-two years later, the fact that I didn't recognize the bells of the sleigh the night before Christmas as the bells of the pinball machine Christmas morning remains one of my most enduring lessons in the power of our wishes and moods to influence our perceptions of the world around us. Though I've not always put it to good use*, the awareness that what I see is often influenced by what I "want" to see was a much longer-lasting gift than the pinball machine or anything else I found under the tree that morning.


*In that way, it's like the gift of exercise equipment--you have every intention of using it and you know it would do you good to use it, but all too often it ends up abandoned in some corner--a treadmill turned clothes rack.

Drum Roll Please

And here it is--the final disappointing post to top off a month of mostly disappointing posts. It's kind of a tradition.

Under The Wire...

I left the house at 7:30 this morning and walked in the door five minutes ago (11:30 p.m.). Worked an eight-hour shift and then drove for six-and-a-half hours getting Sons-Two and Three back to college. Spent the last half hour of the drive watching the low fuel light flicker and wondering if the friggin' light was serious or just messin' with me. Not that it really mattered because there was nowhere open to stop (welcome to the Boondocks, baby). As an added bonus, I didn't sleep well last night between worrying about a financial aid issue Son-One is having and poring over the incredibly enthralling Sarah Palin memoir*. Anyway, blah, blah, blah, whine, whine, whine.

There's the post and, speaking of running out of gas, thank goodness there's only one day left.


*It's like the proverbial train wreck--no matter how much you know you'd be better off if you just looked away, you somehow can't make yourself look away.

You Are What You...Read?

I spent the afternoon cramming in the last third of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. It was due at the library today and unrenewable due to the long list of other rabid Atwood fans waiting their turn. Atwood is one of my favorite writers because whatever world she chooses to draw on the page is utterly convincing. It's my personal belief that the writers who are most capable of drawing their readers in are the ones who immerse themselves most fully in their written worlds.

In the case of The Year of the Flood and Atwood's other futuristic tales--The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake (for which Flood is sort of a companion novel more than really a sequel--there are overlapping characters but the action takes place alongside Crake rather than much before or after it)--this ability to paint persuasive pictures is chilling. Though all three books are fiction, the dystopian futures contained within them are built with the blocks of factual current events and the outcomes, though different, are utterly believable. The Handmaid's Tale imagines a future in which religion as government is taken to a frightening, and heartstoppingly believable, extreme. Flood and Crake imagine a future in which technology (particuarly biotechnology) and the corporations that control it manipulate the world for their own ends with catastrophic--and heartstoppingly believable--results.

I have spent the evening trying to shake the vague uneasiness (and okay, a little outright panic) Atwood worked so hard to create.

Counting Down The Days

After today, there's three, baby...three!!!!!!!

Happy Birthday (Saint) Hubby

Today is Hubby's 42nd birthday. Convenient that Thanksgiving so often falls on Hubby's birthday since he's one of the things I'm most grateful for in my life at the moment.

We've definitely had our share of rough spots (and sometimes it seemed like a few other people's shares as well). There have been whole stretches of time when it seemed not only unlikely but completely impossible that we would be together to celebrate his 42nd birthday but here we are--still driving each other crazy (both good crazy and bad crazy), and still together. Thankfully.

Since You Put It That Way

In honor of the upcoming official start of the holiday shopping season I offer this little nugget from my own Christmas shopping past:

When I was nine or ten, my dad took my siblings and I shopping for our mom. I really wanted to get her an electric can opener but my dad said, "Don't you think you should pick out something a little more personal?"

His suggestion? A frying pan. Her own personal frying pan.

That's My Boy

Son-Three texted me recently: "There's this guy that travels around to college campuses preaching against gays and trying to get people to punch him so he can file lawsuits."

Fearing a repeat of the skin tag conversation in which he asked me if it was okay to rip off a skin tag and when I said no, he told me he had already ripped it off, I said, "Uh...you didn't punch this guy did you?"

And he said, "No. He's not coming 'til tomorrow."

Always a champion of saying the things that should go without saying, I say, "Well, don't punch him."

Then my thoroughly heterosexual 18-year-old son said, "I wasn't going to. I was going to walk by while holding hands with JC [his gay roommate]."

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Blubber*

A few weeks ago, Daughter-Only and I were waiting in the car at Kmart while Hubby was inside shopping for I really can't remember what and it kind of bugs me because it's pretty rare for me to sit outside while he goes shopping so you would think I would remember what it was he was shopping for, but I don't and it's not at all relevant to the story, so...

Daughter-Only and I were sitting in the car in the Kmart parking lot around dusk one evening and I had partially reclined my seat and was yawning frequently. I said, "I'm soooo tired. And I'm really sick of being tired all the time. And it's hard for me to figure out why I'm so tired since it seems like I don't really do that much, but something that not everyone realizes is that when you're as overweight as I am, it's like carrying around an entire extra human being all day long--and not just a child-sized human either but a pretty good-sized adolescent or young adult."

This is not the first time I've made this observation to a member of my family, but it is the first time I've decided to share it with the bloggy world at large. Yes, I realize that it's largely (ha ha) my own fault I'm carrying around this extra person. And yes, I realize that only I can set this extra person down--but I can't set him down all at once--and all the things I can do to set him down bit by bit, I must do with him still hanging on.

Please understand, this is not a poor me, I'm fat post--it's a matter-of-fact observation that everything an overweight person does they're doing while carrying around an extra person. Try to imagine a 120-pound indvidual going about her day carrying around another 120-pound individual. It would definitely slow a person down and wear a person out.

For a lot of people, "fat" and "lazy" go together like sick-and-tired and salt-and-pepper. It's almost like it's all one word: fatandlazy. And I'm just here to say that until you've walked a mile in our extra-wide shoes while carrying an entire additional person, you have no idea how hard we "fatandlazy" people work just to make it through our day.

*Actually he sort of is. That's kind of the point of this post.

Other NaBlos I Have Known

NaBlos come and NaBlos go, but cop-out posts are forever.

"I came, I saw, I posted (sort of). I'll try harder tomorrow."~~Nov. 4, 2006

"I'm posting.It's not much but that's what I've got today.It counts, right? And I promise to do a better job tomorrow. Maybe promise is too strong a word...(Hey, it's got a beginning, middle and an end--they're just all really close together.) " ~~Nov. 4, 2007

"The halfway mark & I got nothin'. I realize I've also had nothin' a significant number of days leading up to this one. The difference is, as celebration of the halfway mark, I'm respecting us both enough to just say so up front." ~~Nov. 15, 2008

And my personal favorite...


"Blahg Post
Blah blah blah blah, blah-blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah-de-blah blah blah blah.Blah blah blah blah blah*, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah; blah blah blah blah blah!

*Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah." ~~Nov. 6, 2008

Ripped From The Headlines--Or Actually From The Inbox Of Daughter-Only's Phone*

Daughter-Only was texting the guy she's calling her best friend this week--who several years ago was her boyfriend and with whom she's maintained a fairly steady friendship broken up by occasional weeks of "I hate him! He's an ass!" where they weren't speaking to each other. This guy was talking about Daughter-Only maybe coming over to hang out over Thanksgiving break but warned her that it was boring at his dad's house.

D-O responded: Well at least you'll have company.

Best Friend For Now: Yeah, and misery loves company.

D-O: Correct.

BFFN: But company only likes misery as a friend.

D-O: LOL!

BFFN: Hence it's miserable.

*Not only did she give me permission to plagiarize her text conversation, she practically begged me to do it.

Speaking of Bestsellers That Will Likely Make Me Want To Do Bodily Harm To Myself...

Part of me wishes she would just go away but a whole other (meaner) part is hopeful that all this new exposure will expose her* for what she's been all along--a person wholly unqualified to hold any major governmental office--and then she'll go away.

*To the few who haven't already noticed.

Twilight: Zigging When Everyone Else Zags--With A Link For All You Zaggers Out There

A disclaimer: I have read none of the Twilight books. At the height of the furor over the books, I did consider reading them. And the entire set is owned by a member of my household who shall remain nameless but who is not the member you would assume owns these particular books so it would've been easy enough to do. But I didn't because a) I have a long history of zigging when everyone else zags (See: Andy Gibb vs. Shaun Cassidy, Rad Daly vs. Scott Baio , etc) and b) I have given in to this kind of temptation when it comes to books before with results that left permanent psychological scars.

Most recently, I gave in to the hype about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. A book's topping the bestseller lists for ridiculous amounts of time usually works to dissuade me from reading it (zig-zag) so it took recommendations from lots and lots of people close to me to convince me to give this book a try. I have to give Brown credit for a suspenseful plot--had it not been that suspenseful I would never have made it to the end of the book without simultaneously stabbing myself in both eyes so as not to risk ever having to look at a passage from that book again. (Seriously? After six years the main things I remember about the book are the albino monk and Dan Brown's egregious overuse of the word "upwelling.") In case it's not obvious I am still a little bitter about that experience.

Before that, it's all the way back to 1992 and The Bridges of Madison County. It was short, which was a good thing but the prose was so purple it was practically grape-scented and essentially the whole thing boiled down to a glorification of adultery which left me less than impressed.

In the case of the Twilight books, even people who have ravenously devoured all four books admit that the writing is not all that great. So no, I haven't read the Twilight books or seen all of the first movie but I know lots and lots of people who have so in honor of the release of the Twilight sequel New Moon, I'm going to send any New Moon fans out there over to Jen Lancaster's blog Jennsylvania where she has posted her own version of New Moon acted out by the official action figures of Bella, Edward, Jacob & Alice. (Spoiler alert--though I doubt very, very much that anyone for whom this movie could possibly hold a plot twist or secret not already leaked or purposely read about is likely to click the link.)

I'm Actually Doing You All* A Really Big Favor

Long day which began with taking Daughter-Only to school careened through a staff meeting and a training session (bloodborne pathogens and sexually transmitted infections anyone?) bounced to grocery shopping and picking Hubby up from work early due to some miscommunication that's better left unelaborated** upon and then screeched into an eight-hour shift during which the only time I sat down I was behind the wheel and, finally, stumbled into me twisting my ankle on my way to my car at work because the flipping outside lights that are supposed to be on a timer are apparently on a different schedule on Wednesday nights than any of the rest of the week.

So...yeah, I could write a "real" post but it would just be an extended whining session and no one really needs more whining in their lives, right?

You're so very welcome.

*Does a number you can count on one hand with a few fingers left over really constitute an "all?" It's like the Steven Wright joke about how he got into an argument with someone over what he considered an "odd" number. Or maybe not.

**I'm pretty sure it's a word or at least an acceptable construction consisting of word-like parts.

The Worst Customer Service Job Ever

There are no guarantees in life. But if there were, who would be manning the customer service desk? Who would hear the complaints? And what complaints would there be?

"I like the color. It matches my eyes, but it's a little too tight in the hips."

"It's so much louder and more complicated than I expected it to be."

"There must've been a shipping delay. Mine came too late--I would've much preferred the Renaissance."

"Do you have something a little longer? I got this one as a gift and it's not quite right."

Brought To You By NaBloPoMo

Welcome to tonight's episode of "Random Crap That's Inside My Brain!"

I had a long conversation with Cranky* today. We still talk once or twice a week--always at her initiation. I always figured that once we weren't around each other 8 hours a day, I would be better at tolerating her but either she's gotten significantly worse or my tolerance level has dramatically decreased. It's a weird thing--I feel some kind of sympathetic obligation to her because she really has so few friends and she's been unable to find other work since the flower shop closed, but talking to her almost always makes me feel like someone is rubbing a cheese grater across my forehead.

*Formerly Cranky Boss Lady, but as she's no longer my boss and was never really much of a lady, her name has been shortened accordingly.

Halfway There...

...and that's pretty much all I got tonight.

Starting Even Earlier

As alarming as Fourth Niece's stories of the failed romantic relationships (of nine-year-olds) were, they pale in comparison to this gem from Baby Brother's Girlfriend's Then Four-Year-Old Daughter.

I picked her up on the way to Daughter-Only's (then) Boyfriend's house. Four-Year-Old had spoken with The Boyfriend by phone once or twice because Four-Year-Olds love the phone and at that point Daughter-Only and The Boyfriend spent a pathological amount of time on the phone and had to fill it with something.

I told her we were going to pick up the Boyfriend and Four-Year-Old said, "Is he the one with the hot voice?"

And I said, "Honey! You're FOUR!"

And she said, "What?! It's not MY fault he was born hot!"

Maybe It's Time For A New Hobby

Drove Fourth Niece home from the skating rink tonight. The car ride was educational--as only car rides with nine-year-olds can be.

She says, "Well there was a lot more drama than usual tonight."

"Oh?"

"I mean, yeah, you can't have skating without drama. There's always drama, but tonight, it was way worse than usual. About half the girls were crying."

"Why?"

"Well some of them got dumped and some of them got ran over*."

"Run over?"

"Yeah, like they fell and people skated over them? But I didn't get dumped or ran over tonight. Lots of boys like to dump girls at skating. I don't know why. I've only ever had one boyfriend..."

"And you dumped him?"

"No. He dumped me. At skating. Well actually he had his friend dump me at skating, but not tonight. It was a long time ago but I still love him. The boyfriend, not the friend who dumped me for him."

"So did you have a good time tonight?"

"Yep. Thanks for the ride."

*Same difference.

Consider The Source

When a not-terribly-bright person says something not-terribly-bright it's sad, but to be expected. For instance, during the first Gulf War I worked with a blond* chick who had earned her ditz reputation** so when she heard that we were bombing Baghdad and said, "I thought we were fighting Iraq," her confusion--while it made those around her roll their eyes--was not really surprising.

When, however, someone you've considered reasonably intelligent who has never given you cause to doubt that intelligence comes out with something duh-worthy, it can mess with your head a little.

Recently a coworker--a man in his fifties who has lived in our rural county for most of his adult life--said to me, genuinely confused, "Wow, there's been a lot of dead deer alongside the road lately. What do you think happened to them? It's probably cars--I mean, it has to be cars, right?"

I just nodded but I couldn't help wondering what he thought it might be if it wasn't cars. Exhaustion? Aliens? The mental and emotional stress brought on by NaBloPoMo? A plague in which the deer are coincidentally dropping dead right next to the road?


*Just a coincidence, not a stereotype.
**This is the woman who said, sincerely, that she was voting for Bill Clinton because he had a "nice ass."

TGT"F"!*

About mid-October, I got another promotion at work--this time to housekeeping supervisor, an official full-time position with benefits including sick, vacation, and personal days and paid holidays and insurance. The trade-off is that I work 2:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday. On Sunday, I work 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. That means that Sunday is the new Monday. But you know what else it means?

Thursday is the new Friday--woo-hoo!

*Thank God Tomorrow's "Friday!"

Here and Gone Again

"It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really."

~~Lorrie Moore

Hubby is working with a guy who recently bought six or seven properties around town--the best of which would be generously called dilapidated. They are planning to work together to repair these houses as rental units. There is one in particular Hubby sees great potential in and asked me to go with him to check it out as a possible rental for us once the renovations and repairs have been made.

Hubby has a significantly better imagination than I have and where I see only the daylight coming in from the outside in places where daylight should not come in and the daylight failing to come in in places where it should (windows covered with plywood), he sees nothing but possibilities. He can imagine the place freshly sealed, drywalled, painted while I can only imagine it collapsing down around our ears.

We were bickering about which of us was more realistic about exactly how much work (time, money, materials and so on) the place would require to be just livable, let alone comfortable, when I stepped out on to the raised deck outside the back door and my right leg promptly went through the rotted wood to about mid-thigh. My left ankle had twisted at a nasty angle with the sudden shift in weight and there was nothing nearby to grab on to for leverage so I was stuck there with one leg dangling until Hubby could pull me out of the deck.

In the thirty or forty seconds that I was stuck there lots of things were running through my head--at least one of them the obvious I-told-you-so potential of being moderately injured by a house I had just argued to Hubby was a deathtrap. But one of the things that went through my mind in those seconds was that something very similar had happened to my mother many years ago.

In 1985, when the family was packing up to leave our house in New Hampshire, my mother was carrying a box across the raised porch and her leg went through a weak spot. I wasn't there when it happened (having moved south ahead of my family partially in pursuit of Mr. High School) but I saw the resulting bruise--enormous and rainbow-colored--and could easily imagine where on the porch her leg had gone through. The weak spot had been there a while and we had been warned away from that end of the porch for the last six months we'd lived there.

So I was stuck there in the deck imagining my mother 24 years ago stuck in a similar fashion in a porch 400-some miles away and it occurred to me, not for the first time*, that the people who are gone from our lives come back to us in the oddest of ways.

*Here & here for example.

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Eating The Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman

I started this book last night and am more than halfway through it though I have, at least theoretically, found time to sleep, eat and work an 8-hour shift.

The book is not at all about dinosaurs but instead is a collection of essays about pop culture and what the culture says about us. Klosterman is a genius at pointing out connections you've never seen but that seem both brilliant and obvious once he's called them to your attention.

The truth is when I'm reading Klosterman, half (or more) of my brain is in the book no matter what I'm doing, which explains this lame blog post and lamer review which does nothing to explain the greatness of the book or Klosterman.

Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Addictive.

Some Secrets About PostSecret (Some More Secret Than Others)

1. I have been a fan for a long time (at least three years, based on this post). I check the website for updates most weeks and own all of the books.

2. I have sent in two separate secrets over the years, neither of which I've seen again (so far).

3. About a year ago, I made the gigantic mistake of telling Daughter-Only that I had sent these secrets. While I did not tell her what these secrets were, I did agree that if either of the secrets were ever to appear on either the site or in one of the books and she asked me about that specific secret, I would tell her the truth.

4. So far--as I mentioned above--neither of these secrets has resurfaced but that hasn't stopped Daughter-Only from honing in on the most disturbing secrets to appear each week--and, of course, in the recently released book--and asking me if they're my secret(s).

5. At first, I was terrified that she would find and guess my secret but at this point, her finding out a "secret" truth about me would be better than her temporarily thinking these insane things about her mother.

Whose Idea Was This Again?

'Cuz I'd like to kick their asses a little.

The Nose Is Running, The Brain Is Not

Who had Day Six in the how-long-before-she-posts-a-cop-out-post poll?

Hot For Teacher

One night, a couple years ago now, Hubby was interested in a little, shall we say, "vigorous cuddling." On this particular night (as on so many particular nights), I was exhausted. But in the spirit of marital generosity, I said, "Okay, I guess we can, but on one condition--you're going to have to do like 89% of the work."

Ever the negotiator, Hubby countered, "Well that depends on what your 21% is going to consist of."

"For starters, I'm going to be tutoring you in math."

What's Next? A Thank You Card From FOX News For My Many Years of Faithful Viewership?

I know things have not been looking great for the Republicans, but I had no idea they were desperate enough to resort to random, nonsensical SPAM messages such as the one I found in my inbox this evening:


"Dear [Masked Mom],
On behalf of the leadership of the Republican National Committee, I want to thank you for helping our Party earn historic victories in Virginia and New Jersey yesterday.

Your steadfast commitment to our conservative Republican principles and your generous support of the RNC's 2009 campaign programs enabled us to provide all our GOP candidates with the resources they needed to run strong right through Election Day.

Electing Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey is just the beginning. With the continuing commitment of RNC Sustaining Members like you, I am confident we can elect more GOP governors, make real gains in the U.S. House and Senate, stop the Democrats' radical leftist agenda and cut President Obama's term in half in 2010.
Thank you again for everything you did for our Party and our cause during Campaign 2009.

Sincerely,
Michael Steele, Chairman,
Republican National Committee"

I can only assume that the meanings of "steadfast commitment" and "generous support" have changed dramatically to include "doing nothing" and "actively rooting against."

At least the Republicans sprung for a better copywriter than that widow of the Nigerian businessman who keeps hounding me with misspelled and gramatically incorrect e-mails about the millions of dollars she'd like to split with me. Perhaps I'll put her in touch with Mr. Steele and show those Republicans just how generous my support can be.

Six Degrees of Influation

You know flu season is bad when conversation at work consists almost entirely of how close the flu virus (seasonal or H1N1) has gotten to each of us.

Client: My boss has a grandson who has H1N1.
Me: My oldest son's girlfriend's roommate has it.
Client: Well, it's way closer to me than to you!

Ok, ok, you win.

It's Like The Geek Olympics

So it's the original National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo)-- the chance to achieve fame (uh, not so far), fortune (not that either) and fabulous prizes (but not for me--at least not yet) but most importantly, the geeky sense of accomplishment that comes from posting every single day for a month (good thing it's the most important part 'cuz I've had that in geeky spades for the past 3 years).*

*My sense of accomplishment was only minimally diminished the year before last when I was gypped out of the ability to post the final day by the failure of not one but several communications companies to provide me with the ability to communicate via the Internet. But I'm not bitter because the only thing worse than being a geek is being a bitter geek.

Escalating Acts of Randomness*

If random (and moderately disturbing) texting ever becomes an Olympic event, rest assured, you don't have a shot at the gold. Bronze, maybe. Silver, if you're lucky. But the gold surely belongs to Daughter-Only and I.


Here's a recent text conversation between Daughter-Only and I in its shockingly pointless and odd entirety. It began normally enough--with D-O asking if I was getting a break from work (presumably so I could give her a ride home)--and then swerved completely out of control almost immediately. Daughter-Only got the last word because I was forced by the cruelties of timing to actually pay attention to my job while I was at work.


D-O: Break?


MM: In Bolivar [a town about 15 miles from home].


D-O: Why?


MM: Meeting.


D-O: Until when?


MM: 9--I'm not getting a break. Working til 10:30.


D-O: I know you work until 10:30 you silly little poopsicle.


MM: Sweet.


D-O: Yep. Diaper rash.


MM: Ostrich ass feathers.


D-O: Blue chicken wing pillow fights.


MM: Are just the wings or the entire chickens blue? Is it a naturally occurring blue or a sign of injury, disease or other bodily distress?


D-O: The wings are. And they were born that way, after of course, the Great Explosion of Nayithe, in which a number of cats vomited on William's coat.


MM: Ah, but the question remains who put the bomp in the bomp-de-bomp-de-bomp? PS--Whoever it was failed to put the bomp in the T9.


D-O: Well the little ditty of Vienna thinks you're so vain time after time.


MM: Uh--of COURSE I'm vain--this song is about me. And then some.


D-O: Nope. Wrong again. It's about the Pilgrims swimming in tidal pools of iguana saliva.


MM: Sweet salmonella--you win. But worry not--the hounds of heinieville will rise to howl again--and maybe even hump your leg.


D-O: Wicked wheat waffles!! How could the dolphin orphanages host such a curtain of packing peanuts? It's slutterly ridiculous.


MM: Depends entirely upon what is packed among those peanuts. Was it Schrodinger's cat? Cuz if you apply the Dupendorfer principle the answer is bad venison.


D-O: No, no. Schrodinger's brother was in those peanuts!! Incoming news: an obese walrus from Tenessee just had a severe heart attack on the walls of a Turkish ballet studio. Bring immediate help! (And two lollipops.)


MM: What flavor? Lollipops I mean. Everyone knows walruses are root beer flavored. Except the really old ones--they taste like avacados.

D-O: Not nearly as bad as the douche canoe flavor of an Indian Vortex Lion. Oh, what's that? You don't know what a douche canoe tastes like? That's insane. Who hasn't tasted a makeshift boat filled entirely, and only with vaginal cleansers?! You are sooo deprived.


MM: True story.


D-O: Not as true as the skies are blue.

MM: It is too truer than the skies are blue. But not quite as true as the blue chicken wings were blue.

D-O: Goat killing should be provided by the 97th amendment.

MM: I thought that was the plan. Unfortunately both goats and their potential killlers will succumb to a rogue hiccup virus long before that amendment's passed.


D-O: Terrible how one tiny sheep-wannabe can be mentally damaged to the point of no-return by a single rusty-orange fingernail.


MM: That's a whole other bale of fish fur.


D-O: Shedding bananas, SmudgyFace! What a brilliant observation. It's as delicate as looking into a tin foil mirror with only seconds left on the clock of doom.

*Randomness beat out randmosity here largely because the suffix "-osity" was ruined for me by the episode of Growing Pains where Carol got the job writing for the school paper and in her eagerness to show off her superior intelligence fills her assignments with unnecessarily long and complicated words. The paper's advisor calls her in and tells her, "This story stinks." She says, "I don't understand." And he says something like let me put it in words you will understand: "It's replete with stinkyosity."

C'mon, October, Seriously?

Dear October,


My blog buddy Erika over at Dry, Ink had a few stern words for you last week about your behavior in Louisiana--specifically about your failure to show your face and put an end to temperatures in the nineties. I'm not sure what you're doing with yourself in Louisiana this week, but I'm not at all amused by what you've done around here.


Your job in our little corner of the world is to gently usher the leaves off the trees as you gradually lower the temperatures, preferably with strikingly blue skies to highlight the gorgeous colors of the leaves. Instead, we've had rain and cold and clouds and this morning, we had this:




I mean WTF and a half, October! Two inches of wet, heavy snow?! Widespread power outages due to the leaf/snow combination breaking limbs and taking out power lines across the region?!


I wasn't really sure what to do with you, October. Should you be grounded? Or fired? Have your paycheck docked? Fifty lashes with a downed power line? Then it hit me, I'm going to do something even worse...

I'm telling Erika on you.

Biopsy Performed By That Dude From The Frat House Down The Street

Son-Three was home from college a weekend or so ago and showed me a small growth on his neck--something he believed was a skin tag but that I was pretty sure was a mole in the larval stages. In any case, it didn't meet the criteria for anything to be overly concerned about--just something to keep an eye on.

He texted me the other day: "Can I rip off a skin tag?"

I texted back: "A. No. B. It might be a mole. C. No."

The return message? "Let's say I already did and I'm sure it's not a mole."

Let's say I'm glad I was 100 miles away when that determination was made.

My Newest Superpower: Interior Design

Looking around our cramped bedroom that's painted a horrid shade of blue just this side of teal*, Hubby says, "This room needs painted badly."

I look around at the bulging and cracking wallpaper covered with a quarter-inch thick layer of pukey blue paint and at the window and door frames plastered over with the same thickly applied paint, and observe, "Uh, it's already painted badly."

*Teal is a four-letter word.

How It Got Here I Haven't A Clue*

A month into his first year of college, Son-Three reports that one of his new college friends marked two milestones in one day. In the morning, this friend, JD, got his first tattoo--praying hands--at a local shop called The Pink Armadillo. That evening, he decided to drink alcohol for the first time--and ended up drinking until he was quite wasted.

So wasted in fact, he approached Son-Three and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Dude, look at this, look at this. Someone drew hands on me! Who would do that? I'm totally going to get to the bottom of this."

Son-Three says, "JD, remember? You got that from The Pink Armadillo."

JD mulls this over for a second then says with amazement, "Dude--did you know pink armadillos could draw?!"

*From "Margaritaville," a song in which Jimmy Buffet commemorates a few of his own milestones such as looking for his lost shaker of salt, blowing out his flip-flop by stepping on a pop-top and, of course, the brand-new tattoo: "It's a real beauty, a Mexican cutie/How it got here I haven't a clue."

Let Her Out Once In A While To Get Some Air

Bumped into a former Shop Groupie at the grocery store two days in a row. She's an old friend of Cranky Boss Lady who dresses almost exclusively in various patterns of camouflage though she neither hunts nor was ever in the military. On seeing me the second day, she said, "You sure cruise these, uh, food places a lot."

"Yeah, that's how I keep my girlish figure," I said, while waving my hand to highlight my decidedly ungirlish shape.

Camo Lady raised an eyebrow. "Where do you keep her?"

Laughing, I said, "In a locker at home--it's the only place she's really safe."

"Yeah, I've had mine tucked away so long I'm not sure I remember where I left her."

"I used to take her out on special occasions--I guess it has been a while."

Happy To Do My Part

First day of school. Daughter-Only and I head out the door early--determined to get off on the right foot. Apparently, we're not the only ones. Traffic around the school is backed up through all the surrounding intersections--cars stopped at weird angles, people sitting through two or three lights halfway through the intersection, and so on.

Suddenly, I see our chronic lateness last year in a whole new light. I had thought I was disorganized and a failure as a parent for being unable to motivate my children to get out the door on time most days.

I see now I was merely playing an important role in reducing the morning traffic congestion around the school.

You're welcome.

I'll Take Potent Potables For $500, Alex

My current state of mind, revealed in text messages:

Little Sister: We have a bunch of lemons. Do you want them for lemonade?

MM: Sure--are these literal lemons or metaphorical lemons?

LS: I will just give you the literal ones and spare you my metaphorical ones. :)

MM: That sounds good. Despite what you may have heard, the metaphorical ones are often too sour to make a potable lemonade.

LS: Definitely! and bitter too.

Our Little Girl Is A Woman Now, Or Have You Ever Really, Really Wanted To Laugh Even Though You Knew Laughing Was The Utterly "Wrong" Thing To Do?

So Ex Sister-in-Law and I and her two daughters, Third Niece and Fourth Niece*, along with Daughter-Only, were school shopping over the weekend. This shopping involved driving in Rochester, which compared with my teeny tiny town is the Big City. At one point, I lost patience with the guy in front of me and said just above a whisper, "All right, fuckwipe, make a decision or get the hell out of the way."

ES-I-L chuckled and said, "Wow, I've never heard you cuss behind the wheel before."

I explained that now that my job involves driving so much I really have a lot less patience for other people on the road. Daughter-Only piped up somewhat in my defense, "Well at least you're not as bad as So-and-So [a family friend known to be a little, shall we say, testy, especially behind the wheel]. She screams at everyone."

"Well, that's because So-And-So is a B-I-T-C-H," I pointed out, oh-so-cleverly spelling the word even though my nieces are 9 and 12 and well beyond the age when I can get away with that.

Without missing a beat, Third Niece chimes in, "Are you just F-U-C-K-I-N figuring that out?"

*Formerly Youngest Niece and Next-To-Youngest Niece, whose Blog Names have been changed by the arrival of Fifth Niece, brand new daughter of Baby Brother and Sister-in-Law-To-Be. Similarly, Only-Nephew has become First Nephew with the arrival of Second Nephew (formerly Fetus-On-The-Fridge).

Don't Even Mention The Table Saw

So we've moved again about which I'm not at all happy. I've been acting like a complete ass instead of acting grateful to have a roof over my head. In my defense, it's not that easy to muster gratitude for a roof when it's not only got moss growing on it but grass and a few stalks of goldenrod sprouting up there as well. Looking on the bright side in this case probably means being grateful that the goldenrod didn't have fertile enough ground to actually bloom.

In addition to the flora sprouting from the roof, the house was full of the previous tenant's belongings. Not just a few things left behind in a last minute move, but rooms full of furniture, clothing, bedding, eyeglasses, half-finished bottles of water, and so much more--all tidily arranged and remarkably clean considering the house had been left empty for nearly a year.*

This meant essentially moving two households of stuff over the course of six days. Our new landlord told us we were welcome to keep any of the left-behind stuff that we wanted and have a yard sale with the rest. Hubby was delighted to find a variety of new (still in the package) and like-new power tools on the cluttered back porch. On one of our many trips between houses, he said to me, "There was a belt sander that I don't think has ever been used."

From the backseat, Daughter-Only piped up, "Why would you want to sand your belt?"

*Long and complicated story, but we've been assured she's not dead and also not coming back for any of her stuff.

Embracing Change

Big changes are afoot here at Masked Mom Headquarters. (For starters, we've apparently begun using the word "afoot" with a relatively straight face.) Long-time readers and long-suffering real world friends and family members all know that change is not my favorite thing, but the thing about change is that it comes whether you like it or not.

The flower shop where I've been working (or engaged in occasional work-like activity broken up by long periods of reading, writing, gossiping, and yelling at the boss) for ten years closed permanently as of May 30. I was fortunate enough to find a new job before the shop closed--so there was no gap in employment but instead an overlap during which I worked 50-70 hours a week at both places all while still ferrying around four children and trying to occasionally remember I have a husband.

The new place is a halfway house where I have already been promoted to the position of "transportation coordinator" which is a fancy way of saying I'm in charge of getting seventeen assorted recovering addicts to their various appointments (and back again) in a timely fashion. Plus filing monthly reports on mileage, gas and other expenses and keeping up maintenance for the house's four vehicles.

It's more money than I was making before--and way more challenging and entertaining. So I'm learning at this late date that maybe embracing change is the best plan--especially when it's inevitable.
And I would embrace it--I really would--but I'm too tired to lift my arms.

Apparently Not Everyone Is Equally Hooked On Phonics

There was a period of time when the kids were younger when Hubby and I got in the habit of calling each other "diphthong" as a teasing insult. I don't even vaguely remember how it got started, but I know that at one point, Hubby called Youngest Sister that and she quickly came back with "Umlaut!" To which he responded, "Schwa!"

You not only had to be there for that one, you also had to be a little bit of a geek.

Flash forward to this afternoon. Phone call from Son-One, "Mom, what's a diphthong? I just called Girlfriend-One a diphthong and she didn't know what it means and I just realized I don't really know how to explain it."

Ah, Son-One perhaps you should worry a little less about the defintion of diphthong and a little more about what other quirky time-bombs are left behind from your childhood...

Shakespearean Dandruff

Despite being present and very, very alert during her birth, I have occasionally wondered if Daughter-Only was perhaps switched at birth or dropped here from an alien ship because she is so very different in so many ways from her dear old mom. She's very social for one thing, supremely confident--occasionally annoyingly so, she will say anything to anyone (or so it seems). She has, for instance, proposed to several total strangers with a relatively straight face. She has walked down Main Street in town asking random people if they've ever been to Chuck E. Cheese or if they know the Mexican Hat Dance. She's just an all-around out-there kind of kid--unlike her mother, who while decidedly weird, has always kind of hidden her weird little light under a bushel.

Anyway, last night, she says to me, "Mom! How come T-9* has 'Shakespearean' but it doesn't have 'dandruff?'"

Try--just try--to imagine a texting world in which it would be necessary to use either the word Shakespearean or the word dandruff. And then, take that one step further into a universe in which the same person might need to text both words in the same one-hour period.

She's mine. She's definitely mine.

*T-9 is the texting "dictionary" in some cell phones.

Lessons Learned #346

In no particular order, some things Masked Mom has learned in recent weeks:

1. While I was born right-handed, I did go through a phase as a kid where I tried to retrain myself so I could work equally well (or at least acceptably) with my left hand. This was wildly unsuccessful and motivated almost entirely by the fact that I loved the word "ambidextrous." Recently I noticed that without even being aware of it, I had been texting left-handed. Not only can I text left-handed, I can text signficantly faster and more accurately with my left-hand than with my right: I'm ambiTEXTrous!

2. My 14-year-old daughter has a firm grasp of supply and demand and may be some kind of budding economic whiz kid. When she found out that tickets to the high school's production of Little Shop of Horrors cost $6, she said, "I thought, 'That's ridiculous for a high school play.' But then I realized that Hot Senior Boy is wearing tight leather pants in the play--now that's worth $6!"

3. There's nothing quite like waking up with a migraine to make you appreciate waking up the next day without one.

"Where's My Bailout?"

"Where's my bailout?" said Cranky Boss Lady to the (long-suffering and insanely underpaid) Masked Mom for the millionth time.

For the millionth time, I say, with exaggerated (and not entirely heartfelt) patience, "The theory* is that the bailouts given to the banks and other financial institutions will benefit the economy as a whole in the end--so we're all being bailed out, sort of."

Cranky Boss Lady says, with a whine for crap's sake, "It's not fair."

I lose it. "How old are you? Didn't you just turn 58?! Can you really be walking around expecting the world to be fair?!"

Seriously--you know what's not fair? Being trapped in a truly dead-end job with a FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD boss who is still wounded by the unfairness of life and being trapped in that job at a time when the economy is so crappy that I feel lucky every day to have even that job.


*Note that I am not defending the theory. Neither am I pretending to fully understand the forces at work in high finance or in the federal government.

And the Winner Is--

Rough coupla days around these parts. When it comes to the most disturbing thing I've heard in the last four days, it's a toss-up. The candidates:

My mechanic saying, "It is the fuel pump. Once you figure in all the parts and labor it's going to be just a hair over $400."

The girl at the car rental agency saying, "We're going to go ahead and upgrade you to the Malibu because the Cobalt has a funky smell in it and we can't figure out where it's coming from."

Refrigerator Art

Last night, Son-Three yells from the kitchen: "Just what I want to see when I'm trying to decide what to have for a snack: a fetus!"

Technically it's not a fetus, but an ultrasound picture held on the refrigerator by a magnet. And it's not a picture of just any fetus, but a fetus with my youngest sister's nose or a fetus who looks just like my brother-in-law, depending on which side of the family you ask. It is, in short, a baby whose expected arrival in late summer is eagerly awaited not only by Youngest Sister and her husband but by the many people who love them.

Even Son-Three, who is sometimes relentlessly, dangerously adolescent, is excited. Son-Three happens, by sheer coincidence, to share a real-life name with Youngest Sister's Husband*. This afternoon, he says to me, "Mom, if it's a boy do you think they'll name it after me?"

*Lou B. of the Masked Mom Comment Hall of Fame**

**There is no Masked Mom Comment Hall of Fame, but if there were you can bet your butt he'd be in it.

Where's Homeland Security When You Need Them?

Taylor Swift's song "Love Story" is insidious. And not in a good way.

It not only gets in your head, it stays there. It is bouncy, repetitive and sickly sweet. I spent a recent night waking up repeatedly to the sound of those lyrics and that boppy tune chasing themselves around in my brain. It made falling back asleep difficult. I would finally drift off only to be woken up again a short time later. And again and again.

All this despite the fact that I haven't actually heard more than the opening few seconds of the song in days. When I hear it begin on the radio (I can name that tune in two synthesized notes), I change the channel not only quickly but vehemently. A song that relentless has got to have some connection to al Qaeda, right?

Decisions, Decisions...

Years ago, I read a riddle on the last page of Reader's Digest. It went something like, "There were seven frogs on a log. Five of them decided to jump off. How many frogs were left on the log?"

Two, right?

Son-Three, who was seven or eight at the time, piped up, "Seven!" without even a second's hesitation, which was of course the right answer because, as the punchline helpfully pointed out, "Deciding and doing are two different things."

I've been thinking a lot about those frogs lately. The fact that Son-Three got it--at seven or eight and so quickly!--while I failed to get it at all at thirty-something was probably an indication of more than just my slow-wittedness. The fact is deciding and I have a decidedly dysfunctional relationship.

On the one hand, I will spend absurd amounts of time agonizing over seemingly trivial decisions--seriously, I've spent more than an hour picking out a birthday card on more than one occasion. Hubby has practically had to physically drag me out of the pen aisle at Wal-Mart when the choices--blue, black, ballpoint, gel, clicker or cap--have overwhelmed me. On the other hand, I will often make much more serious decisions--say getting married or naming one of my children after a high-end sports car--with much less agony and forethought.

Further complicating matters, the degree of agony involved in making a decision is no indicator whatsoever of the likelihood that I will actually follow-through with said decision. In other words, as fraught as my relationship with deciding may be, my relationship with doing is much more so. Deciding and I should maybe someday be in couples counseling. Doing and me? Well, it's straight to the Jerry Springer Show for us.

For instance, I have decided a number of times (a very high number) to go back to school. I have decided to look up information. I have decided on courses of study. I have decided to fill out the applications and financial aid forms. Of all the times I have made these decisions--sometimes it seems I've made them on a daily basis--I have made it three-quarters of the way through the applicaton process exactly one time before being distracted by the facts of my life and by the very convincing whining of my little chickenshit brain.

This is one frog who's very tired of sitting on the log. Tired of deciding over and over again to jump off. This frog has gotten tough with herself, putting her foot down--this time I'm serious!--and she's tired of that too.

This time, she's not deciding a single damn thing. She's doing.

The Wednesday UnWhine: "Guess What!? Tomorrow Is The Day Before Friday!"...

...that's how I was greeted this morning by Baby Brother's Girlfriend's Four-Year-Old Daughter, her voice full of excitement--the kind of excitement you might expect if she'd won the lottery and the oversized check was being delivered by Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny.

Hard to maintain a whiny attitude in the face of all that enthusiasm.

The Wednesday Whine (Introducing An (Alliterative) Weekly* Collection Of Things That Have Annoyed Me Most In The Past Week)

For this, the premiere episode of The Wednesday Whine, I'll begin with the thing that annoyed me the absolute most this past week and then continue in no particular order:

A. Due to prior commitments to beings I brought into the world who think this fact somehow entitles them to huge chunks of my time and energy and commitments to other people I did not bring into the world but who nonetheless seemingly ceaselessly clamor for my (limited) time and energy, I was unable to begin The Wednesday Whine on an actual Wednesday but had to wait instead for Friday night after a stressful volleyball game and, therefore, am too exhausted to self-edit thereby producing this amazingly long, essentially senseless, if not actually run-on, sentence.

B. Church sign I saw last Saturday night: "NEVER BE AFRAID TO TRUST AN UNKNOWN FUTURE TO A KNOWN COD." Yes, it said "COD," just like that. I drove by, did a double-take and actually backed up to double check. Heck of a "typo," but that wasn't really what annoyed me. What annoyed me was they left it up like that all week. Who knows? Maybe it was a recruitment strategy: lure people into calling to report the "mistake" and then invite them to Sunday service.

C. When I mentioned the church sign to Cranky Boss Lady she said, "A known cod? Would that be Van De Kamp's or Gorton's?" That annoyed me, because it was fast and funny and Cranky Boss Lady's not supposed to be either of those things.

D. In other more typical Cranky Boss Lady news: After making the harrowing drive in to work during a winter storm, she said, "I couldn't help noticing that everyone off the side of the road was driving an SUV" in a tone suggesting there was some kind of karmic justice being wreaked out there on the road--arrogant, overconfident, four-wheel drive driving drivers, blah, blah blah getting what they deserve by winding up stuck in a snow drift. Great theory. Would've meant a heck of a lot more were Cranky Boss Lady not the proud owner & driver of a four-wheel drive vehicle who only last month found herself off the side of a snow-covered road, stuck in a ditch, needing towed out by a tractor. As she rambled on about irresponsible SUV drivers, not for one second did her own overconfident navigation of her own SUV cross her judgmental little mind. Errrrrgggg.

*No promises.

Happy, Happy Inauguration Day To You

On every birthday up to a certain age, someone invariably would ask me, "You're 4 (or 7 or 10) do you feel any different?"

And, of course, I didn't feel any different than I'd felt the night before when I was still 3 or 6 or 9 because the essence of being 4 or 7 or 10 can't be compressed into a single day or a single moment.

I was thinking about that today, as our 44th president was inaugurated: We have a new president, do I feel any different?

Well...the truth is that a new president will affect the day-to-day facts of our lives very little in the immediate future.

But...the other truth is that I do feel different and I think that feeling is called hope and I think and believe that the man who was sworn in today along with the team he has assembled around himself, can live up to that hope.

PS--Obama's speech was moving and perfectly delivered and I think that's great because I think a good 65% or so of the presidency is about public relations (at home and abroad), but still the best words I heard all day were on the AP radio feed: "A helicopter carried former President Bush away from Washington toward Andrews Air Force base..."

Two Observations For The New Year

--Flannel sheets are the double-edged sword of linens. Good: they are amazingly warm and fuzzy and comfortable. Bad: they are amazingly warm and fuzzy and comfortable so you never want to get out of bed, which severely compromises your ability to function in your normal life. But it's okay because flannel sheets are way better than functioning normally.


--I have grown increasingly perturbed in recent weeks by the fact that windshield wash comes in gallon jugs while the reservoir in my car apparently holds three quarts. I started thinking about it and I've never driven (or filled) a vehicle that did hold the whole gallon. At this point I have six quarts of windshield wash in my garage in six separate containers because I always forget about the leftovers. Shouldn't someone in the wash industry get with someone in the auto industry and hammer out a plan to address this disparity? Maybe we could use a couple million out of the bail-out money to finance that little project, it would make about as much sense as some of the other stuff that's come out of it.

That Holiday Spirit

I was in Kmart early in December and saw what appeared to be a grandmother with her granddaughter. The granddaughter's (apparent)dad had gone in the opposite direction and the granddaughter, who looked to be about three, was squirming in the cart, and saying, to the grandmother, "I don't want you. I don't love you." in a whiny three-year-old voice.

The grandmother said, "Well, good, because the less people who like me this time of year means the less presents I have to buy."

Warms the heart, doesn't it?

NaBloPoMo Recovery

One of the things that happens when you post every day for a month is that when it's over, you feel kind of funny not posting for the first few days.

Then you get over it.