You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
It is 11:30 at night, and I am awake, and I am feeling guilty. I’m awake partly because I love nighttime and wish I could stay up til 1 or 2 every night and then sleep til 10, and partly because I decided that if I had to do the dishes, goshdarnit, I would also make zucchini bread, so I felt doubly productive! Despite the fact that the dishes take 15 minutes and zucchini bread takes an hour to bake, this made sense to me. After all, it’s summer, and of course we turn on our ovens at 11 pm and make our tiny kitchens into slightly larger-than-oven-sized ovens. Though, if it comes out as planned, this should be the Be-All, End-All of zucchini breads. I just have a feeling. So there’s that, and there’s the guilt, which is because I know I have to work in the morning and I hate waking up even after 10 hours of sleep, so after 6 (which is what it will be post-zucchini), I’ll feel super cranky. And I don’t even have Starbucks money, because I treated myself to an exorbitantly expensive grande iced mocha this afternoon and now have $1 to my name for coffee funds. My stupid debit card still wasn’t mailed to me, after 3 bank visits to mention how it was supposed to be here, oh, IN JUNE. Anyway, the most guilt is because my brother-in-law is sleeping on our couch – or he would be, if I wasn’t in here baking and doing laundry (productive!!) and typing. Right now he is sleeping on the floor of my bedroom, and my husband is sleeping in the bed, because they were in there watching TV (the A/C is in there) and both fell asleep during whatever Real! Life! Danger! the Discovery Channel is currently broadcasting (crabs or oil or cops or something, they eat that shit up).
Now, my brother-in-law (who I will refer to after this as BIL, like they do on message boards), is not some 40 year old dude who is crashing on our couch post marital breakup or something. He’s 15, which makes him about 11ty billion years younger than my husband. But he has spent 5 nights a week on our couch (which, by the way, I have a good story about. And which is also a really nice red.) is that my husband, who is a dear, sweet man in his own way, though if you meet him you would wonder how I live with him (and vice versa, I am awful to live with, too)…. This sentence is getting too long. So my husband got this photography job (yay!) and despite a history of getting these jobs that sound fabulous, where he is told that he will be making more money than god, etc. and then ending up working in a hellhole making less money than this guy, he decided to try again. So, since the job was supposed to be So Good, he got my sister and his brother both jobs there. But his brother lives in the woods about an hour and a half from us, so his mother drives him here for 5 days, picks him up for the weekend, then drives him back here after the weekend. So there is a teenager on our couch. This is weird because a lot of times I feel like I’m a teenager, and I end up being unsure whether to be mom-ish with him to make up for feeling like I’m his age, or to just act like myself and end up looking desperate and unhip. I usually go for unhip because not being myself is just too much work.
Sooo… I had a point to all this. There was something earlier about how I wanted to post about my garden and I was like “nah, how much does the internet need to hear about my garden?” and then I realized – this was a real “ah-ha!” moment for me – that all those posts I wrote about my garden? I wrote them in my head. They never went on the internet. The internet probably has no freaking CLUE that I even HAVE a garden. Then I felt stupid for thinking the internet could read my mind.
E took a picture of my ass yesterday. I think that I should be all “oh, ugh, my ass!” but I kind of like it:
I’m probably not supposed to be posting it, since I think it’ll go up on his Flickr and all that, but it’s my ass, so THERE. Actually, it’s not even ass so much as back, really, now that I look at it again. Either way, having an amazing photographic supergenius for a husband is fucking awesome. He should be rich and famous right now, because DAMN, his pictures are breathtaking. Though it’s always weird when it’s pictures of you to say that, because then you sound sort of conceited.
Anyway, so it’s raining today and I am Bad Mommy and the kid is watching 8000 hours of TV while I dick around on the internet. I should be making pancakes and cleaning all the rice out of my sink from where it stuck onto the pan and then I forgot and dumped the soaking water out of the pan and filled the sink with rice. It’s too yucky to contemplate right now, though. Am a terrible, terrible housekeeper as well as Bad Mommy. The cat is sitting next to me in the window watching squirrels run up and down the tree next to the house – I guess that’s like kitty TV? I was going to say that it strikes me as boring and then I found myself watching the squirrel, too, and realized that squirrels are fascinating, or else I am so lamely trying to ignore the sink/dishes/pancakes that I am pretending to be interested in squirrels. Either way I am really, really lame.
Today W and I abandoned work and summer camp and went to the beach together. We drove over, him in the back eating jelly beans and reading comic books graphic novels (they’re the same in my world, but the Borders lady looked at me weird when I said comic books), me in the front listening to Mgmt and drinking one of my newly-beloved Doubleshots over Ice (6 shots of espresso, people – you just can’t go wrong with that!!).
For some reason, I felt so happy on that drive – the music up; the sky blue; gorgeous birds of prey doing that cool thing where they just sort of lie there in the sky over the trees, still as if they aren’t moving at all; the prospect of salt water and sand and crabs and jellyfish ahead. This is the sort of thing I want to leave him with – memories of a childhood full of sunshine and sand and music, hours of time spent having fun together.
It drives E crazy that I don’t have a lot of childhood stories – few dramatic incidents, few moments that really stand out – but I think that’s part of the joy that was my childhood. There were family dinners every night, summer days at the beach or in the pool, winter evenings sitting around playing Balderdash and drinking tea and laughing, everyone crowded around the kitchen island making our own pizzas…. It was all these tiny, normal, mundane moments that have all blended together into one story – one time we went to the beach, one time we played that game, one time we made pizza. There is such a safety in that feeling of the days all being the same, in the wash of the hours repeating themselves over and over like waves breaking on the shores. I want that for my son, too. I want his wife someday to tease him about his idyllic childhood, and for him to shrug, smile, and toss their kid on his shoulders as they walk on the sand together, hand in hand.
BlogHer always gets me going – getting all nostalgic for something I’ve never been to, for friendships I don’t have and the blog I don’t really write in…. I go through and see all my favorite writers’ stories and pictures and remember that this, this camaraderie, this group of people who I actually would want to be friends with, this is why I keep a blog instead of a handwritten journal. This is why I keep that long, long google reader list. This is community and sisterhood (brotherhood, too) and maybe the world isn’t as big and scary as it seems like, because there are people in it who live far away from me but are close via internet. I still have issues with holding back and not getting to know anyone, I still get standoffish and shy, even when it’s just electronic, but knowing that they are there does make me feel a little less lonely, a little less weird.
Plus, there’s always so many links to places I’ve never been, places I used to go and stopped going to for one reason or another, places I stop by occasionally and then forget the URL. There are so many people out there, so many words written and stories to be read and so much sharing, so much “I’ve so been there” or “I have no idea what that’s like, but damn do you write that well”.
Sundry linked to this Pioneer Woman post, and I was just blown away by all the lives gone astray – I think I always feel like I’m the only one living something I never imagined for myself, and to see that it’s really true, life is what happens while you make other plans, it’s not just me… It’s another layer of community and another sigh of relief that I’m not alone. So with all that, I’ve been feeling sort of warm’n’fuzzy all morning, more inclined to connect, more part of the community. So I figured I’d reach out a little bit, write a post, offer up a book (because, like I said when I emailed Mir earlier, what can I do with two copies?), make some comments – be a piece of something a little bit bigger than my own world that I get so stuck in.
My dear, dear friend Jen just posted a little something on her blog for the first time in about 6 months, and she hit the nail on the head: “And, by the time I had gotten over that heap, that thing happened, where too much has happened. You know? And, you look at the page totally helpless like? Yeah. So I gave up, cuz I’m a big fat giver upperer.” This is how I feel about my blog right now. It is so BLANK, the screen where you type. It’s so empty and only I can fill it up and how scary is that?? This is why I gave up poetry, somewhat. It got too scary. It stopped just flowing out of me and started being something I had to work at, and that was it for me, I couldn’t handle the pressure. I am not good at pressure or trying really hard or staring at blankness and turning it into something not-blank. And yet I really DO miss the blog thing, I miss having that little place to pour out myself and to feel a reciprocity with other bloggers (and doesn’t the… not really word, I guess, but for lack of a better term… doesn’t the word “blog” sound even more ridiculous than it already does if you keep repeating it? Blog, blog, blogger! Silly.)
Anyway, so, I just got back from what my husband dubbed our “staycaversamoon” (staycation, anniversary, and honeymoon all crammed together elegantly) – the 4th was our anniversary (5 years now!!) and we went camping. Camping!! I could hardly believe myself, since historically I have been the queenly sort of girl who hates camping and all that it stands for. But we had a great time – swimming, sitting by the fire, drinking, just generally doing nothing but hanging out together. Then yesterday was a whole long day at the beach with my mom and sister and the Boy-o, which was fantastic, too. And now I have both sunburn and tan and wicked bleached blond eyebrows, and I look sort of ridiculously summery, like some sort of “after” picture for the effects of not wearing sunblock or a big enough hat – even though I did do the SPF 50 thing, I guess I didn’t re-apply enough – but I feel great. I freaking love summertime.
