Sticks and Stars

In order to ensure that my girly bits do not shrivel up and fall off, I’ve decided to pursue a relationship of a baser nature with a friend of mine. It was his idea (about a year ago) and I’ve let him flirt with me and tease me until tonight, when I finally took the step to go to his apartment, let him make me dinner, let him kiss me, and then let him help me scramble around his bedroom looking for my underwear at 10:35pm so that I could get home and relieve my babysitter by 11:00pm.

It was a good night.

No, there is no possibility of more with this particular friend (unless by “more” you mean more occurrences of me looking for my underwear). The reason why we never dated despite getting along really well is that he has no interest in children whatsoever. But in the year we’ve known each other we’ve still managed to become pretty good friends. He’s the person I go to when I don’t understand men (which is pretty much always), and he’s the person to whom I say things like, “I feel so ugly today. No one will ever love me,” because I know he’ll say something in response like, “What are you talking about?!? You are adorable and if people aren’t currently fighting over you it’s because they are stupid and blind.” Of course I never believe him, but who doesn’t like to hear shit like that? Because I am not trying to convince him of how cool/smart/funny/clever/witty/interesting I am, I can always just be my sometimes funny, sometimes clever, sometimes interesting but always dorky self. And that’s nice.

I have no idea how this whole involvement will go. I’ve only done this sort of thing once before, many, many years ago, under entirely different circumstances and it ended when the other party confessed her love to me. I’m not worried about that happening here, but I do worry about my own feelings. I’m not so afraid that I’ll fall for him (because really, he’s not my type, not the type I generally fall for at all) but I do worry about…I don’t know…something. I worry that I’m lonely and that maybe I’ll get clingy out of that loneliness…or maybe that I’ll mistake desperation for actual feelings for him and muck things up…or maybe I’ll just grow to count on this relationship and when it ends because he meets someone he wants to get involved with in a more serious manner, I’ll be very sad and feel rejected even though I knew from the outset what the terms of our involvement are. Sometimes what I know in my brain differs greatly from what I know in where ever it is that I keep my annoyingly irrational emotions.

I’m not going to let my worries stop me though, at least not yet. It was too nice to feel another grown up human being’s skin against my own, and too nice to feel all those nerve endings exploding, and…heh…too nice to take the lord’s name in vain over and over again.

I am going to take this second-to-last NaBloPoMo entry to attend to some business I should have attended to months and months and months ago.

I’ve was tagged for two different memes, one a mere few months ago, the other a mere several months ago, and I did nothing in response. Nothing! [hangs head in shame] I did post about it, or at least I started to, but I just could not choose the requisite people to tag in turn. I tried, then I wrote an entire post about how I just could. not. do it (also unfinished and unposted) and then I let myself be distracted by shiny things and guiltily pretended the whole thing never happened. But today I will rectify my wrongs.

I feel terrible about it not only because no one ever tags me for memes and when it happens it makes me feel so special and popular so you’d think I’ve give those tags the attention they deserve, but also because if I tagged folks for a meme (as I do below) and they didn’t respond, I would feel so terrible, like they just rolled their eyes and scoffed when they saw that I tagged them, as if they had time to waste on something so petty from someone so unimportant. And while I’m sure that Selzach and Kristina are not nearly as neurotic and overly sensitive as I, I would still hate to think that I might possible have inspired even a hint of such feelings.

So let’s get down to business.

First:

Selzach tagged me as a:

And it’s just so true! [preens]

In turn, I identify the following lovely ladies to also be Rockin’ Girl Bloggers (in alphabetical order, not in order of how much they rock):

Ada - She doesn’t post anymore (or least not anywhere that I know of, but when she was blogging she was always at the top of my reading list.

Deirdre - My parallel universe fraternal twin.

Kristin - Perhaps the original rockin’ girl blogger.

Kristina - No one I’d trust more with my girly bits…er…my birth-related girly bits, that is.

Nikoline - Her posts soothe my soul, help me appreciate my journeys and make me feel all peaceful and shit.

And then, Kristina tagged me for the “8 Things About Me” meme:

Rules:

People who are tagged need to write in their own blog these rules & the eight things. At the end of the your blog post, tag six people and list their (blog) names. Leave a comment on their blog telling them they’ve been tagged and encourage them to read your blog.

1) I grew up in a small, conservative, rural logging down. My dreams were entirely too big for the white trash community of which my family was a part, yet I was entirely too poor to rise above. Needless to say, I did not fit in and endured much, much misery as a result.

2) I am horrible (horrible!) at replying to emails. If people took as long to respond (or even not respond) to my emails as I take to reply to others’ emails, I would think they really, really sucked. And I do. I really, really suck. I constantly come up with plans to be better about it, but it never makes a difference.

3) I fear I might be one of those people who is kind of a slob in their every day living. But I also don’t believe that it’s innate, just a lack of the awareness and training to be otherwise (I come from relatively slovenly parents). I’m working on this and am much better than I used to be.

4) I am deeply, deeply conscious of being a fat girl. I feel very aware of how I do or do not fit into the various stereotypes our society holds about fat people and I feel very paranoid about ways in which I contribute to them. For example, I like when I have the opportunity to tell people that I work out every day because I’m sure they can’t imagine that someone like me would, but I never get candy from our candy jar at work when anyone else is around because I know that people will notice the fat girl raiding the candy jar…even if everyone else is doing it too.

5) Until very, very recently I was afraid of the dark but I managed to train myself out of it. If I let myself think about it, I still am, but I just don’t. I also stopped watching scary movies even though I love them because they were the primary reason I was scared. Movies I watched as a child scare me to this day.

6) I am a terrible insomniac and one exercise I use to get myself to sleep is to work my way from head to toe imagining what my body would be like if it could be exactly how I wanted it. I hate this exercise because it only reinforces all the things I hate about my body instead of something even remotely useful, yet I keep doing it because I fall asleep before I reach my head without fail.

7) I feel like I am a teenage boy in how much I think about sex. Probably it’s largely because I’m not having any, but it’s always on my mind. I gotta do something about that (the not having any part, not the being on my mind part).
I wish I was more the person I am on my blog in real life.

The people I tag in turn (although I certainly don’t blame them if they scoff and turn up their noses at my tag) are Barbara, Jane (is that your nom de plume?), Kristina, Lucia and Selzach.

Whew! Such a weight off my shoulders!

Tonight, as preparation for bedecking our halls, my boys and I (or really, my “boy” since my other boy will only work to undo our efforts) are going to clean out their room and get rid of some of their toys. I’ve been reading a lot about parents doing this as a pre-holiday method for culling the crap and teaching their kids about consumerism and whatnot and that sounds good to me.

Amusingly enough, it was actually my four year old who suggested it. I’ve been trying to implement the things I’ve learned (and am continuing to learn) from How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk* and one part is not yelling at my kids when they make poor choices, but instead using methods that are more effective in empowering them and instilling the kinds of behaviors I ultimately want. I’ve been at a loss as to how to get my four year old to clean his room** without a big yelling fight every time (and let me assure you, there is a big yelling fight every time) but finally I had a lightbulb moment and sat him down and explained to him that his room needs to stay (relatively) clean but when I ask him to clean it he tells me it’s too hard or that it takes too long, so that suggests to me that there’s too much to clean, and so maybe we need to get rid of some of his toys so that it’s more manageable. I made this suggestion as sort of a veiled threat, hoping that it would inspire him to clean his room in an effort to keep his toys, but I was quite surprised when he readily agreed that he had too many and started discussing which toys we could get rid of.

I was actually the one who balked a bit at the thought of getting rid of some of my boys’ toys. I paid good money for those toys! What if they missed them later and I had to rebuy them?! What if I accidentally removed some key childhood toy?! And my four year old is terribly fickle. There are plenty of times that he will tell me that some action is okay that later turns out to be so not okay. But ultimately I realized that this is definitely for the best. My boys do have a lot of toys, and I would like to get rid of the crap they don’t care about in favor of their key items.

As a compromise to my fears, we are going to divide the toys into four piles: 1) crap to be tossed/donated, 2) crap they will likely appreciate when they are older but that they don’t really appreciate now, 3) crap that they like now but can be put away to be rotated in at a later time, 4) current crap that will be kept in their room and rotated out at a later date. Of particular concern to me is the age difference between my boys. With perhaps the exception of the trains and train tracks, my boys are definitely interested in different toys. I’d hate to get rid of toys that my four year old has outgrown but that my one year old just hasn’t grown into. So hopefully my compromise of rotating in and out toys and saving some toys that are currently “too big” will at least partially address that concern.

I’m excited to do this. I don’t have much money to spend on xmas gifts this year and I particularly want to make sure that I get cool, creative toys that are going to be fun and inspiring for my boys. I am telling all external gift givers that we would like experiential gifts (like memberships to our local children’s museum or aquarium, etc.) and I have plans to make a few gifts as well (books staring my boys and the things they love). I am sure I will still likely spend way too much money because I can’t deny that xmas is my favorite holiday and I do have a tendency to go way overboard, but I want to at least make a few efforts to go overboard in a conscious, thoughtful manner, and I think that preparing in this manner will set that off to a good start.

*For those who think that How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk sounds interesting but who can’t be bothered to read some boring parenting book, let me add the disclaimer that what I particularly like about this book is that the actual writing in each chapter takes up maybe two pages while the rest of the chapter is filled with cartoons exemplifying the presented concept, brief exercises that offer a scenario and the opportunity to imagine/write responses using the presented techniques, and then a section of Q&A or stories from parents who’ve put the concepts to use. I too am a child of the ’80s and my attention span was shot to hell by MTV and video games and too much soda or whatever. Two pages of actual reading when it comes to parenting books is about my limit, which is why this book works particularly well for me…and maybe you too.

**Pre-children, I always imagined I would be the type of parent who didn’t make their kids clean their room. If they wanted to live in filth, so be it, it’s their space, I should respect however they want to keep it. Post-children I realize that part of my job is teaching them lessons and skills that will benefit them their entire lives, and I know that as an adult I sure as hell wish that somebody had instilled a sense of the wisdom of cleaning up after myself so that it wouldn’t currently be so hard to train myself to do this. I also can see how much harder it is for them to actually play when no surface in their room is free, but how they haven’t yet learned to make that connection of how to make sure that they always have that play space. These days I don’t have insane room cleaning expectations (for example, I don’t give a shit if their bed ever gets made), really I’d just like most of the toys to be cleaned up most of the time, and for them to attempt to tidy up after they’ve made a huge train track landslide of every toy they possess. And really, it’s not even about cleaning, it’s more about them having the space to play and being able to find the toys they want to play with. And me not tripping over shit in the dark, hurting myself and swearing mightily.

Yesterday night, despite my pain and recovery efforts, I managed to make turkey soup (and such good soup it was and continues to be!) and then I started browsing yarn websites. My career as a knitter was fairly short lived (mostly because I had no patience with a small child who was determined to “help”) but it’s been cold lately and I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to have a scarf and I’m pretty sure that even if I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about casting off and stockinette (and actually, I’m not sure I ever knew how to cast off), I bet I can still whip out a scarf. And really, I don’t even want anything fancy, in fact I want probably about the easiest scarf possible. So that bodes well.

I’m thinking something like this, except in blues and greens instead of pinks and purples. I feel like I saw a lot of these scarves last year but haven’t seen any this year, so I guess they must be out of style (or everyone who was a beginning knitter last year has moved on to more complicated projects), but I don’t really care. I want something fluffy and soft and pretty…and really, really easy. This scarf fits the bill. Except god only knows where my knitting needles are…and I’m pretty sure I never had size 17 needles to begin with.

In other news, I think I might use my upcoming weekend of freedom to take a trip to the coast after all. It sounds like such a fun thing to do, even if I do it alone. I imagine myself lounging in my room enjoying room service and cable, going for walks on the beach and building a sand castle, sitting on the deck overlooking the ocean and sketching or writing, sleeping late sprawled out across the entire bed, visiting all the quirky tourist shops, going for a long swim in the indoor pool, singing long and loud to good music during the drives down and back. Of course, it’s nicer to imagine doing all of this and then also having many orgasms…although I suppose don’t necessarily need a companion to make that happen…it’s just nicer that way.

We shall see. I found a nice hotel that offers 50% off during their off season (and that meets my room service/indoor pool/deck overlooking the beach requirements) so as long as I don’t go too crazy with meals and souvenirs, I won’t spend much more than I thought I’d spend on my birthday (which I did not), and less than $300 for an all-inclusive weekend away at a nice hotel (with an indoor pool and room service and a gorgeous ocean view) seems like a pretty good deal to me.

Despite my intentions to the contrary, I wound up staying home from work today. I feel so guilty about it although I don’t know why because really, if there was ever a day where staying home was warranted, it was today. Not only did I feel like shit, but everyone who saw me immediately made this face of semi-frightened, semi-leery concern, so I think it’s safe to say that I looked like shit as well. And I still do, for that matter, but I’m feeling much better.

When I started calling around for a dentist this morning (I can’t believe I’ve had dental benefits for almost a year now and I have yet to find a dentist) every office I called kept referring to this one particular office (most dentists don’t take emergency patients who aren’t already established with them). Indeed, this particular office kept coming up first on my various search result lists as well, but I’ve driven past this office every day for a year and while I’m sure that the dentist is competent enough, the huge dramatic portrayal of Jesus dying on the cross painted on his “Dr. So-and-so’s Office” sign always turns me off just a little.

But alas, in the end he was the only choice. I tried to stare hard at the part of the mural that depicts Jesus and small children cavorting with baby animals, but my eyes couldn’t help but be drawn up, up, up to Jesus obviously crying out in agony, eyes rolling to the back of his head.

When I got there I found a bible sitting on the waiting room table and plenty of inspiring biblical quotes plastering the walls, but otherwise the office was okay. It was more like some elderly person’s overly full, cluttered living room (complete with fireplace and rocking chairs) but it was tolerable…or I was desperate, either way I was happy enough to be there. Just in case, when filling out my paperwork I opted to list my self a “divorced” instead of just “single,” knowing that my parenting status would come out sooner than later and deciding, after a few moments of pondering, that it might be less of a sin to be divorced than to never have been married at all.

The dentist himself was very…jovial. And jokey. And touchy. I didn’t care for the banter or the kindly shoulder massages, but he seemed professional enough (more or less) and I guess I prefer excessive jocularity over the cold superiority of some dentists who so clearly see through my defensive claims that, “I do floss…mostly.” In the end any concerns I had about the dentist were washed away in the tide of nitrous oxide and decorating shows on cable.

A dentist who is liberal with the nitrous oxide is all right in my book.

I demurely turned down his offer of pain medicine prescriptions and hoped that he saw it as my virtuous manner of attempting to suffer for my sins (he did not need to know that I already had plenty at home and figured that I will get more in a week when I go back for the real root canal).

I’m not entirely sure what he did to me, distracted as I was by painting techniques and lighting schemes and the unexpected hilarity that is commercial tv when high, but whatever it was knocked me on my ass and I sure as hell should not have been driving home after. But I did arrive home safely, and although I debated going in to work as I was determined to do (if I go in for part of the day I don’t have to count it as a day off), I collapsed into bed instead, and here I am, four hours later, feeling pretty good overall. My face still hurts and is still grotesquely swollen, but the overall pain is much, much less. I’m going to see if I can go medication free tonight (except for the antibiotic) and maybe by tomorrow I’ll feel mostly human…and hopefully I’ll look it too.

The real root canal is in a week…this time it’ll be two hours of nitrous and decorating shows. It does not seem like a good indicator about my quality of life that I am looking forward to a root canal.

My toothache is still quite agonizing. I can honestly say that I’ve never had a toothache like this. Damn, it hurts like hell.

For about the first hour after I take my ibuprofen and percocet I feel decent and the pain, although still very present, is less. After that it gets really bad again and I resort to clove oil until enough time has passed that I can take more drugs. By the time I take more drugs, I am whimpering and pacing because it hurts so insanely much. And then after the drugs I am so intensely nauseous that I can’t move for fear of throwing up.

And then I throw up anyway, so really I shouldn’t bother trying to avoid it. And indeed, when I start to feel that telling nausea I’ve been immediately heading for the nearest toilet or appropriate receptacle. I’m learning that avoiding the vomit, that pretending it’s not going to happen until the very last second results in me throwing up in my hands or shirt, or leaving a long trail of vomit behind me. And let me tell you, when you already feel like shit, cleaning up vomit does not add to the party.

I hate throwing up so much. I was thinking to myself today that as much as I hate needles, if I had the choice between getting a shot and vomiting, I’d definitely choose the former.

I did manage to drag myself (and my boys) to the doctor this morning and they were kind enough to dose with with antibiotics, antinausea meds and painkillers. I didn’t even have to talk, they just took one look at my swollen face (hugely swollen on the left side from my eye to my chin), and then watched me vomit into their little yellow bin and they wrote me my prescriptions and sent me on my way.

I really wanted to have a lazy weekend this weekend but I didn’t see how I could possibly make it happen. But now I see exactly how. When you’re in so much pain that even turning your head hurts, “lazy” is pretty much a requirement.

This toothache went from, “Hmm, I seem to have a toothache, that’s no good,” to, “Oh god, please let all my teeth just fall out so that I never have to feel this way again.” By this morning I was looking around for tools that would allow me to do the job myself.

At the moment I feel mildly better because I have dosed myself on every medication I have in the house. I’m not sure what good simethicone drops left over from my one year old’s infancy will do, but my desperation is leaving me open to any and all possibilities.

Although I was up most of the night rocking back and forth and moaning in pain, I did manage to drift off a couple of times. The first time I dreamed that I got tired of my boys’ dad’s endless stream of nasty comments so I lept onto him, threw him to the ground and started screaming at him and strangling him while bashing his skull against the ground. My only thought was how this wouldn’t reflect well on me in court.

The second dream I had was about that boy I was dating a while back. I dreamed that I ran into him on the bus and for some reason he kissed me but his beard was full of ketchup so he got ketchup all over my face. I recall thinking that once you got past the ketchup, it was actually a nice kiss.

Now I’m going to spend my day trying to avoid moving my body, particularly my head, and see how long my boys will allow me to go without actually speaking to them. Hopefully I can work turkey soup making into that somewhere.

I planned to post long and loud about my birthday (or at least this anniversary of my birth) today, but at the day’s end I am just too tired. I’m dealing with a cold, I have a terrible toothache and my lips are getting chapped, but all that seems like nothing compared to my general exhaustion. I have no idea why I’m so tired, but I am.

Suffice it to say, I did manage to create a piece of jewelry today. It was amazing how much of the day flew by while I was engrossed over my poorly lit work table. I took photos but the batteries in my camera died before I could download them. It didn’t feel as good as I might have hoped to have created something, and I kind of wished I had just gone ahead and spent the money to treat myself for a day, but I feel theoretically better about my choice. It’s just hard when you create something and you aren’t sure whether it’s crap but you fear it is and hate the thought that you wasted your precious free time on crap. But oh well.

My dad called to wish me happy birthday and commented again on how good Thanksgiving dinner was (and asked me again to explain how I made my potatoes), and my brother emailed me specifically to tell me how impressed his girlfriend had been with dinner, how she had mentioned it three separate times on the drive home. I guess I really did a good job this year. Indeed, it was one of the nicer Thanksgivings I can recall, and not just because of the food.

Dinner was good and garnered much praise, even from my dad who is king of finding something to bitch about. He went so far as to say that my mashed potatoes were “excellent,” even after he complained repeatedly that there was no gravy. I tried to explain to him that my potatoes are so good that they don’t need to be hidden under gravy, but it wasn’t until he tasted them that he believed me. The key is using more butter and roasted garlic than actual potatoes. And serving them with love, of course.

After dinner my family left and I cleaned up my kitchen so that it would all be taken care of and then I gleefully sat down in front of my semi-finished computer and unwrapped my new video card. Of course, nothing is easy and at first install I noticed that, hmm, it protruded above the outside of the case by a good inch. Greatly annoyed that my video card didn’t fit, I set about researching its replacement only to (eventually) discover mention of a “low profile bracket” to be used with “low profile video cards,” and then further mention that despite no mention of its “low profile status” on the box or in the included materials, my card happens to be “such an animal.” So now I must locate and/or order a low profile bracket. And then maybe this thing will be done…or at least done to the point of installing the operating system.

Tomorrow is my birthday (in case I haven’t mentioned that fact ad nauseum) and it looks like I will be taking the day off from work after all. I wasn’t planning to since I have to take so much time off in February, but when I got word of that childcare subsidy that likely meant I wouldn’t need to take time off in February, I asked my boss if I could take Friday off after all. Of course, the very next day I discovered that it looks like I won’t be able to use the subsidy (more on that later), which means that I really will have to take a bunch of time off in February (when my one year old’s daycare provider is out of town), but I’m pretty sure my boss already thinks bad things about me because I take odd times off and am often late due to my morning bus and have to leave eight minutes before my day should officially be over in order to catch my evening bus, so I decided that I wouldn’t bother making myself look more like some kind of wishy-washy idiot who can’t keep her schedule straight and would just suck it up and have fun on my birthday instead.

What will I do, you ask? Well, my initial thought was that I would go get a massage, go see a movie, take myself out for a nice meal and buy myself this book I’ve been lusting after, but then I realized that would likely total near $200 and that’s just not in the budget this month. Besides, there aren’t really any movies out at the moment that are pulling me toward the theater (I’d be just as content to watch any of them on dvd), and I’m not really in the mood for a massage, and the only meal for which I really want to take myself out is one consisting of a high end steak, and that’s the kind of experience I’d rather share with someone else.

But then on Friday I went to the gallery I visit every month in order to take the last opportunity to check out this month’s exhibit (except now that I think about it the exhibit will probably be there next week too, but whatever) and as I was staring at the pieces and thinking about art and pondering what the pieces looked like and how they were constructed and what I interpreted to be their meaning, I felt such an urge to create. My fingers itched with it and I thought about going on Friday to buy art supplies (because why actually create when you can pretend like you are going to create but just need to buy some stuff first and are then unfortunately too tired to actually create anything after your grand shopping spree so you don’t actually create anything but can offer yourself the excuse that you would if you had only had more time). But then a kind of crazy thought struck me, and I realized that maybe I could just stay home in my clean apartment and spend the whole day working on art.

So I think maybe that’s what I’ll do. I have a couple of pieces in mind, one piece of jewelry and one sculpture and even an essay I want to start (although I might need to spend some more time thinking about that one) and I like the thought of celebrating my life by creating something new. If nothing else, I’ll sure as hell feel better at the end of the day if I’m looking at a new sculpture instead of a hole worn into my debit card.

1) the turkey sitting in brine in food grade plastic bag in a cooler on patio (where it’s fucking freezing — I better not wind up with a turkeycicle in the morning),

2) cranberry sauce cooling on the counter,

3) apple pie filling cooling on the counter as well (I make my apple pies with filling that I’ve already cooked so that it doesn’t shrink leaving an ugly crust and boil over leaving many a smoke detector alerted)

4) a video card, the box for which has not been breached.

I am a good girl….but perhaps a bad geek.