You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2007.
I just realized that I’ve been wasting my time reading celebrity blogs for almost a year now. I should probably be ashamed, especially since I just listened to all 3 of the newly leaked Britney Spears songs.
But I’m not. Man, that shit is entertaining. (Not the songs, which are awful**, but the gossip.)
**caveat – I’m sure if I liked pop music, I’d like them. I’m just not That Kind of Girl.
I took W to the playground today for a picnic, and he fell off the monkey bar-thingies and bit his tongue, and there was some blood. But, for him, the worst part was that the other 3 kids on the playground didn’t come over to comfort him. He sat in my lap, sweaty and teary, and told me he wanted other people to be sad for him, not just me. I’m not enough. The kid needs an audience for everything, even his own pain.
At the same time, he was so utterly shy, just watching these kids play and staying to himself. Sometimes he is like this, sometimes he is all barging in and practically climbing other children. So half the time I worry that he is too overbearing, maybe even too self-confident; and the other half the time I worry that E and I are passing our shy loner genes down onto him and he will end up like me, reading a book on the playground at recess and cowering from anyone who tries to talk to me/throw a ball to me. I guess I worry so much because the introvert-extrovert continuum has been such an issue for me throughout my life, and I have the same problem. Sometimes I force myself past it and say things that are inappropriate, or talk without being able to stop and end up rambling incessantly; sometimes I hide out in a corner behind a big magazine and hardly look up when someone talks to me. I don’t really have much of a happy medium, and every time I see him flip from one extreme to the other I worry he’s going to end up like me. (There’s also the whole Crazy Watch, seeing as how a bipolar dad and a depressed mom tend to equal who knows what for the kid. I’m always on Crazy Watch.)
******************
This has nothing to do with anything, but I was listening to NPR coming in to work today, and some senator or somebody got arrested in a Minnesota airport bathroom. Is there anything that could possibly feel as depressing as that must feel? “Oh, man, what are you in for?” “Well, actually, it doesn’t matter. My arrest was punishment enough. I was arrested in a Minnesota airport bathroom.”
Okay, so work is slightly better and I am absolutely done bitching about it for right now. Man, that’s got to be boring to have to read all those “I hate my job” posts. Please skip them.
So, today’s topic! For complaining! No, seriously. I’ve been reading more and more body image/body acceptance type blogs lately (there are also tons I’ve stopped by and never bookmarked, so I can’t link them here), and the more I read, the more I start thinking about my own body. First, why am I so mean to it? It never did anything to me. Hell, it managed to get me through 13 or so hours of labor, it managed to nourish my son for 21 months – just that alone should be enough to give it a break. Today, I came across this game (go here, click on “projects”, and you’ll see it). I figured, what the hell, tried it and didn’t really like it (Yes, so I do play a lot of online games. And? It’s the dork in me.), so I moved on. But I keep coming back to the sentiment of the game – if you are thin, you are lacking.
Of course this is the opposite of what society tends to portray women, so I felt like I should be pleased by it, like it should be a step in the right direction… only it’s not. It’s not a game about “loving your body”. It’s just another example of how women tear ourselves and each other down every chance we get. First we couldn’t be fat, now we can’t be thin? It’s becoming more and more socially acceptable to commiserate with other fat women and tear down thin women. I remember being sort of horrified by the ruckus on this post at the Big Fat Deal blog, which started over at MamaPop and sort of took over a few places for a little while. I can understand that people were upset, because of course Mandy Moore isn’t chubby, and even if she was she’d still be hot. But all these people up in arms about the post? Are the people who are ragging on Posh Spice for being too thin, or freaking out about Angelina Jolie’s arms. (Full disclosure- I am probably one of them. My celeb blog addiction knows no bounds, and I definitely get caught up in the judgment madness.) That just seems a little hypocritical to me. Like it’s okay to rag on thin people, but not fat people. And that’s not going to make anything better. It’s not going to make our culture more size accepting. It’s just making more women feel bad about how they look, just a different demographic this time. Like this post at Knitting Kninja – it’s not fair that she should have to defend herself for being thin. It’s not fair that I should have to defend myself for being fat. Why, why, why can’t we just leave each other alone? Why can’t we be more like this?
I’ve been getting crap from my boss about being late (stupid traffic), and so this is my desktop at the moment:
I just wish I had the balls to email it to my boss. Not that I don’t get paid a living wage, but I would edit it to read “until I get treated like a human being.”
Work, right now? Is shitty. I am being shafted so hard about trying to move to day shift. They are doing this forcing a square peg (me) into a round hole (stupid job that I don’t want but is “open”) thing, and they are cramming me in hard, with no way out. I have been updating my resume and getting ready to apply to other places, because I hate the way I’m being treated. You don’t make meetings with someone, important meetings about the future of her job, and then blow them off repeatedly because you have to pick your daughter up – at the same time you pick her up every day, not a sudden thing. Especially when I already asked if I should come in early to make sure that we talk about this, and you said “no, it’s fine, we’ll do it when you come in”. Dude, it is obvious you are avoiding me. You are a dickhead, and I’m not stupid. Plus when I leave you are going to be so screwed, because I do a LOT of the work around here. So there.
I really want to send my motherfuckin’ fuck letter out to customers and my supervisor and just people in general because I am so pissed at all of this shit.
I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything solid to post. I am reading More, Now, Again, and I just keep wanting to write as well as Elizabeth Wurtzel does. Half as well, really. I read about this snot-covered, cocaine-snorting mess of a woman; someone who ignores her friends and sleeps through interviews with major news outlets and spends money like it’s water; and I should really hate her, but somehow the way she words things, the way she bares herself, just make me not care that she’s not that likable, really. All I care is that the book has another 100 pages and they will all be full of amazing.
Then I read this post at Girl’s Gone Child, and the companion post (or is it the opposite way?) on Babble, and I just about fell down and started crying about why am I not able to write like that?? Two posts, same subject, and both just bam, spot on, perfect.
I guess I am more of a reader than a writer, though I’ve always been someone with a spiral notebook full of bad short stories stuffed under her bed, a journal erratically kept when I felt that words were the only way to make things feel better. I flirted briefly with the idea of being a professional poet, took an independent study in college, made up a chapbook but never did anything with it beyond turn it in as a final project, won an award (which I still think was sort of not really an award). Sure, I sometimes toy with the idea of a novel, someday, maybe, when I get around to it… but I’m only fooling myself, because I have never put down a single word.
But a reader? That, I have always been, stalwartly, ceaselessly. Today, for 20 minutes, my purse was book-less, and I felt somehow naked. I always have something with me to read. If I get stuck someplace (eating breakfast, sitting on the toilet) without a book, I will read a cereal box, the label on the shampoo, anything. Just for the act of reading, of words. When I was a child, my mother would send me to my room with NO BOOKS, and that was the ultimate punishment, the one that meant I had done something really wrong this time. Books have always somewhat defined how I write, how I think, what I am feeling. Unconsciously I will adopt the characteristics of the characters, I will start to think a little like them, if I write something it will be in a loose interpretation of the style of the book I’m reading.
Not that I am a completely democratic reader. I could never go through the library, starting with A and ending with Z. I am not interested in bettering myself, in challenging myself. My nose-in-a-book habit has also long been a crutch. When I’m depressed, when I can no longer deal with life as it is, I will read more. I will have a book open every moment that I can, in order to escape. I will finish one and move immediately, without any sort of break, to the next. It drives my husband crazy – “Put down the book! You have things to do!” But I can’t, I can’t stomach the things I have to do. I can just read about people doing things. I can exist in my own sort of limbo, live vicariously through the imaginary, at least for now until I feel better, until I can get up and do on my own. It’s not that I don’t live my own life- I do, and I enjoy my life most of the time. It’s just that there is comfort in words, in paper, in a story safely ensconced between covers. The ending is always the same, the dilemmas are already played out before I’ve even cracked the cover. I am a bit player, and I like it – sometimes I just want to escape, to be peripheral to my own story, to get away from myself (wasn’t there a song in the mid-90s about that? Offspring, maybe? It was always on the radio). And if I can’t get away from myself, just have some time off from being me, then at least I can set myself aside and watch someone else for a while.
I used to be a smart, depressed, feminist girl. When I met my husband, I was reading Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities on my lunch breaks at work. I was in love with Prozac Diary and I lent out my copy of Prozac Nation to everyone, because it was just so beautiful and so true. I carried around a biography of Anne Sexton and I had read The Bell Jar three times, and I was taking an independent study in poetry. I would stop my car to scribble down stanzas, poems ran through my head constantly, Billy Collins was my hero. I loved memoirs of sorrow and madness, books about what it is to be a woman and what it is to hurt. I breathed poetry, the words were my air, they sustained me and I could not live without gulping some down every day.
Now? My Library Thing history looks like Red Dress Ink’s backlist. I pick up books about the science of weight loss and obesity, or books that lean toward feminism, or even the psychology of online dating, but then I put them down again. I can’t get that sucked-in feeling, the sense of trueness and sharpness that used to come from reading something that was about someone like me. Someone like I used to be. Now, I feel like I’m too dumb, like my brain is numb and rubbery and can’t take this sort of thing in. Statistics seem so flat, ideas that would have made me rush for my pen to jot down a line that struck me or reach for the phone to discuss the concept with someone now slip through my fingers. They are over my head.
I don’t know what happened. Is it having a child, getting married, working full-time, not being a perpetual student anymore? Is it that I’m just too old, too tired, too worn-out? I’m only 27. I should still be able to think and ponder and debate, I should be hanging out with friends, discussing the meaning of life, or politics, or sociology. I feel like not only am I trapped in a body I hate, trapped in my laziness that won’t change the shape of my waist or the size of my ass; but I’m also trapped in a mind gone flabby with underuse, a mind I’m too lazy to get back into shape. I have all these ideas – when I start working days, everything will fall into place. If we could just move to Boston, everything will be better. If E had a better job and we had more money, things would work out right. Then I think more and wonder if this is just going to be how it is – flabby, lazy, lonely.
Oh, internet! Our love, it is so good. It makes it so that I can ignore my job while I read all 89 million blogs I have slapped into Google Reader. Then I will want to blog about every single blog I read today, because what is more awesome than the extreme meta lamery of blogging about other people’s blogs?
No, seriously, I got No One Cares What You Had for Lunch from the library, and I have bookmarked it like a crazy person and have all these great ideas and tons of posts planned. (First, though, for the record, today at work I had a Moosewood frozen Moroccan stew, a Stonyfield 2-a-day Apricot Mango yogurt, and a cup of chai, and then ruined the healthy goodness by also having a package of Ding Dongs. Incidentally, the image search for Ding Dong has nothing at all to do with snack cakes. Just in case you were wondering).
After that confusing tangent I nearly forgot where I was….
For now, though, I have this post of what I am pondering today, because the internet? She is not only fascinating and able to keep me from work (you can see the work there, next to me, waiting to be done, maybe crying a little), but she makes me think. Thusly:
over at Sweet Juniper, the pondering of children in single and double scoops. (My feelings on the subject in the comments there, if you are interested. I am shameless in my rabid self-promotion!)
over at Cheeky Lotus, the weirdness that was BlogHer. It’s sad that something that should be this awesome affirmation of all of us dorky online writer women can turn into a high school snubfest. Can’t we just all go and have fun and learn something and not care who parties where? (I actually spent way too much time clicking links here and there and everywhere about this phenomenon, because it is oddly fascinating to me. I think it’s because I went to an all-girls’ college).
Outside of the internet ponderings, which took up lots of time for being only two things to ponder, I got my new Marie Claire and devoured the Ashley Olsen article. I’m sort of embarrassed of this, but I can’t help it – twins are fascinating. Famous, weird, scowly, monkey-looking big-eyed twins? Doubly-so. Plus I love looking at pictures of tiny, young people and figuring out how much more expensive their outfits were than my car. Today I got my Cookie, which is another expensive-fest that I love despite what I should feel. They always have great product reviews, though. And Mrs. Young is hilarious. I sort of want to be her.
This post has actually kept me from the other thing I wanted to post, namely I need a day off, my son is driving me crazy and I’m sick of my job and does my husband have to be such a jerk all the time and why isn’t there an elf to do the dishes and I need a nap, except being tired is my own fault because I stay up late reading after work because did I mention I need a day off to be ALONE??? But that post was Utterly Dull and this one was Much More Exciting, right?
I made my own lolcat this weekend. Totally ripped of my favorite one, but now I can say that my cat is slightly more awesome.
The best parts are a) there is cat hair on the cheese because it fell on the rug when he tried to run from my brother’s camera flash, and b) you can see my hand petting/holding down his butt so that he’ll stay to be photographed a little longer. Anyway, this is Marcel. He is my cat. Over the weekend, he was frightened by the camera flash, the rustling of a plastic bag, me closing a book a little too loudly, the rustling of a paper bag, the hamster in her hamster ball, and the air conditioner coming on. Life is scary.
I’ll call it Awesome!/Not awesome! Because this game is just pretty much me listing things that are awesome! and not awesome!. Why? Because, dammit, it’s my blog and I have decided this sounds fun. To me. Probably not to anyone else. Ahem.
Awesome!: Lean Cuisine Roasted Garlic Chicken Pizza. So good you forget it’s diet-tastic microwave pizza.
Not awesome!: Roasted garlic chicken pizza farts. Ew.
Awesome!: Finishing the new Harry Potter book. It was a wild ride.
Not awesome!: Finishing the new Harry Potter book. I feel sort of bereft now. I can’t believe it’s all over.
Awesome!: Going furniture shopping with my sister and ending up getting a new (well, Craig’s List new) and very pimpy red couch for myself (very early Xmas gift from my sister).
Not awesome!: When you meet the Craig’s List guy at a storage facility and so have been making jokes about ax murderers and shallow graves the whole drive to the storage facility, and after the couch is purchased he takes AN AX AND A SHOVEL out of his minivan to put in the storage unit. I almost peed myself.
Awesome!: He either wasn’t an ax murderer or is biding his time and will find us in the night and kill us in our beds. Luckily it wasn’t my address on the check.
Not awesome!: Carrying a couch upstairs in August. It is so motherfucking hot here that I think my skin was melting off a little today.
Awesome!: Post-stair-hauling lounging in my underwear on the new (vacuumed and Febreezed) couch with my new boyfriend, Fred the air conditioner. How did we survive for so long without an air conditioner?
Not awesome!: Thinking about what will happen if Fred the air conditioner falls out of the window. This is very likely to happen, seeing as how precariously balanced he is. It’s not the loss of human life I’m so concerned about (I hate all my neighbors) so much as the loss of the cold air.
Awesome!: I forgot the rest of the things I wanted to list and so this list is over! You’re welcome.
Not awesome!: I forgot the rest of the things I wanted to list and so this list is over! I am sure one of them at one point was mildly amusing. No, really.
I was up until 3:30 last night and highly expect tonight to be more of the same. I forgot how fucking good HP is until I started reading this on Sunday. Hopefully I’ll have rescued myself from my HP stupor tomorrow or something. My brain could explode from trying too hard to escape and do normal stuff (like, say, getting up to go pee. Or sleeping.) I should really have bought the damn book two weeks ago like everybody else instead of waiting to read somebody else’s copy – that way I’d be on the same can’t do anything but read schedule as the rest of the world.
