Sticks and Stars

Tonight I’m using my brand new laptop battery that I got for free after I discovered that the battery I’ve been using for the past two years is actually a fire hazard. I feel like I cheated a little in that my fire hazard battery has pretty much dead for about the past year or so and really only functions to keep my laptop powered during the seconds I’m scrambling to plug it back in, and so really, the fire hazard portion of it is pretty unlikely at this point. But hey, laptop batteries are expensive, so I’m not feeling too terribly bad about it.

Today I also received my five year old’s school assignment for next year and he got just the assignment I was expecting/hoping for. I was explaining to a friend why I chose this particular school and it made me feel better when I remembered all the things I liked and could finally allow them to overshadow the things that made me somewhat anxious toward the end of the school selection process (like the fact that the kindergarten teacher whose classroom I was going to visit never returned my many calls, or the fact that the school was going to put me in touch with another parent so that I could hear from a parent’s perspective, but they never actually did it). What I love about this school is that, fairly radical lefty politics aside, they prioritize experiential learning and take a million field trips. The one comment I hear most often from my five year old is how bored he is in school (already!) and of all the schools I visited, I felt that this school would do the best job in helping mitigate that. It was good to remember that.

And then finally, I met with a lawyer tonight about parenting plans and whatnot and got some information that was a surprise to me and quite useful but also greatly anxiety provoking in that it requires me to finally take action, something I’ve pretty actively avoided over the past two years. Of course, everyone always tells me that I need to make things legal, take him to court and get a parenting plan established and blah blah blah, but let me tell you, it’s really damn easy to tell someone that when you aren’t the one who has to live with the consequences. And given the insane 2×4 on my boys’ dad’s shoulder, there would be consequences, let me assure you.

But these days he’s managed to take his usual efforts to alienate me to new heights and whereas I was once paralyzed by my fear of being mean to him or causing him pain or rocking the boat in any way no matter what he did, I really don’t give a shit anymore, especially now that I know there are options that will get the results I want without throwing down the gauntlet of taking him to court. (Although I fear these more “gentle” efforts will be gauntlet enough).

Sadly (or infuriatingly) the thing that I want is for him to build a relationship with our two year old so that he can eventually assume a significant residential schedule with both boys. I would think he’d want the same thing, and supposedly he does, but his action suggest absolutely otherwise. It used to be that I was willing to keep playing his stupid games because I refused to give up hope that he was truly trying to be reasonable even though it sure as hell didn’t look like it, but lately he appears to have abandoned even the remotest effort toward coming to any sort of resolution. And, of course, as always, it’s all my fault. So that’s fine. If he wants resolution, he’ll finally get one.

I had some small hope today that I might feel well enough to get something done but I was wrong. I managed to get groceries (Hot Pockets, yogurt and bread — no chance in hell that I’m making soup this week) and I managed to do some laundry (primarily my bedding that was peed upon by a sick five year old last night) and I managed to spend $80 at a toy store while only intending to buy a Baby Bjorn Little Potty (the coolest potties out there) as a birthday present for my two year old. I knew the toy store extravaganza was inevitable, though. It’s the very coolest toy store in my city and I am helpless against it. They have every cool toy you could ever imagine and I will be their willing victim for many years to come.

I did manage to spend an impressive amount of ass-time today — that would be time spent sitting on my ass. Mostly I tried to finish the book I’m reading that seems like it will never end (a good book, but sorely in need of an editor) and looking for blogs written by mothers living in my city. I’ve determined that blog stalking will be my latest attempt to make friends in my city, particularly since nothing else I try seems to work. I figure that I’ll read their blogs for a while, decide if they’re cool enough for me, leave a comment or two that will inspire them to check out my blog, then voila, instant friendship. Or something like that.

And of course, when I say that I will decide if they are cool enough for me, what I really mean is decide how well they will fit into my socially inept, dorky, painfully shy, yet smart-and-interesting-once-you-get-to-know-me aesthetic. So far, it’s not looking promising. For example, I’m pretty sure that I won’t have much in common with someone who, in her three sentence profile, describes herself as 1) obsessed with handbags, 2) a shopoholic, and 3) a mother. I am 1) irritated by handbags, 2) irritated by shopping, 3) a mother. I’m also pretty sure the Mormon Mary Kay Republican mother and I will not have much to discuss, nor will the ones who seem inoffensive enough until they devote long and extremely off-putting posts to their Love of The Lord. Now I don’t have anything against Christians, in fact I read blogs by several people who identify as such and who even take the time to write posts about their own spiritual philosophies. Spiritual philosophies, I can get behind, even if I don’t agree with them in the remotest. But posts about the Blessings of The Lord and all that He Blesseth and What The Fuck Ever…yeah, not so much for me.

I also don’t appreciate blogs where the sole source of “humor” is how very hilariously gender-stereotypical are the blogger’s husband/male children/female children/self. Nothing says haw-haw-hilarious like a five year old girl who spends hours in front of the mirror (already!!) or a three year old boy who has three little girlfriends (think he’s knocked any of them up yet?!?!) HAW HAW.

Can you tell I’m in an irritable mood right now? Hell, I’ve been irritable this entire week. I am like the princess and the pea except instead of a pea underneath my layers of mattresses, it’s a ball of snot that has become petrified in my sinuses. I am trying to have some perspective though. I generally manage to bite my tongue before biting someone’s head off (and, happily enough, I am most successful in this venture when it comes to my children — who are also sick and certainly don’t deserve my attitude).

I have blogrolled a few promising bloggers though. At the very moment I don’t think that any of them have promise, but I am trying to keep an open mind and not let my bad attitude combined with my defensiveness in the face of potentially reaching out to actual humans ruin this whole effort before I can really start it. I mean, really. I read over some of my own posts with an eye for how I might take them if I stumbled across my own blog in this search for local bloggers and frankly, I wasn’t impressed. And surely that’s wrong! So I am willing to consider that other bloggers might not express their full coolness in each and every post and that it might take a while longer to make a full assessment of worthiness.

It was pretty cool.

My two year old loves vehicles of any shape and size, but in particular loves small cars of the Matchbox variety (or the cheap, generic, leadfilled alternative). He has about a million of them and likes to carry them around, approximately one thousand at a time. This causes a problem because his small chubby arms cannot easily carry more than four or five cars, leaving approximately 995 of them to continually clatter to the ground, each clatter raising his tension and freak-out level. The anxiety around car droppage results entirely from his daycare, where the only other attendees are another two year old boy and a three year old boy. At his daycare, when cars drop they are immediately snatched up by another small boy, never to be released again. It doesn’t matter that the daycare also possesses about a million of these small cars, the only cars worth having are the cars that are currently held by someone other than oneself. This has left my two year in a state of great anxiety when it comes to being able to adequately hang on to his cars. Even at home, when he tries to carry more than four or five and they start falling out of his arms, he gets very upset and goes a little insane over the whole thing.

For his recent birthday, our count of small Matchbox and/or cheap, generic, leadfilled alternative roughly doubled and in his great excitement over all these new cars, he was determined to carry every single one of them, all at once. As you might imagine, this was not a terribly successful venture and many escalating tears and tantrums resulted.

I just wanted my two year old to be happy and to feel secure that he could carry as many cars as he wanted, when he wanted, so I was desperately on the lookout for something that would assist him. I instinctively had a sense of what would and would not work. For example, I knew that the colander I proffered wouldn’t work because it was too open and had no handles. Nor was the mop bucket sufficient (too big), nor an office supply caddy (handle, but too open and also too big), nor my backpack (too closed, too big), nor a small hatbox (no handles). However, in a fit of tantrum-inspired desperation, I had an idea. I dumped out the contents of a box of oatmeal (only a tiny bit was left, not too wasteful), cut off the top half, wrapped the whole thing in construction paper, quickly crocheted a handle and tied it on, and voila! my son had a lovely red car carrying basket, complete with braided blue handle.

At first he was hesitant, standing next to it with his tear streaked face and car-filled arms, but I gently showed him that cars could rest inside (careful to not suggest I was stealing his cars for my own), and his tense little shoulders relaxed and he carefully placed the remainder of his cars inside, softly speaking to them in his two year old language.

Sometimes I feel less bad about my parenting than others.

Today my little boy turns two. When my five year old turned two, if I recall correctly, I believe I linked day by day to the lengthy, multi-day birth story I wrote up when he turned one (I started blogging when he was about five months old). I could do the same for my two year old, linking to (well, re-posting first) the lengthy multi-day birth story I wrote as his birth was happening, but to be honest, I don’t really want to relive that time. It happened, it was what it was, I made it through with a tiny little baby and now I’ve raised that tiny little baby into a big two year old. I remember when he was so little and how hard it was and how it seemed like such a dauntingly long time until it wouldn’t be hard anymore. And indeed, we aren’t there yet, but it gets better all the time and he gets bigger and more beautiful every day.

I wish I was in a better mood today. I’m still sick and with my sickness comes vast and all consuming irritation toward every person with whom I have to interact or with whom I’ve interacted in the past or even with whom I have to think about interacting. What I wanted to write about is all the amazing things my two year old does, and how funny he is, and how smart (much smarter, I can’t help but thinking, than his brother was at this point), but when I try to write about those things what comes out instead is how bad I feel about my parenting, how I wish I could give so much more, how I wish I had more time and attention and adoration for him, how clearly I can see what his brother got that he doesn’t have a chance in hell of receiving and how deeply, deeply sad it makes me. Sometimes from afar I think about those of you with two kids and two adults in your household and I think about what it would be like to have that extra help and support and kid-devoted-energy and an image comes to mind of a dad coming home and smiling to see his kids and maybe scooping them up and tickling them and it breaks my heart to think that my two year old has never known that and likely never will. It’s terrible to think that all the parental love he knows has come from me because oh god, I am so deficient. There is definitely not enough of me to meet the vast need for love that I see in my children, especially not if I have any hope of even kind of taking care of my own needs. I hate that this parental foundation all comes down to me because I am going to fail them. They will survive, certainly I am more than competent to ensure their physical survival (and thrival), but I feel that they, and in particular my little two year old who really has no one but me, definitely will not get all they need in their little hearts.

I’m actually feeling better, finally. Which is a funny thing to write because today I feel like I have a bad cold and that means that I don’t actually feel great, but in comparison to how I’ve been feeling, I’m at the peak of rosy-cheeked health.

And that’s good because this morning I had to take my five year old to ballet dance class, and while he was in class I had to race to a nearby store with my almost-two year old to grab all the remaining Easter candy for tomorrow festivities, and after we picked up my five year old I then had to drag both boys to my office so that I could spend a little more time working on my project that’s due Monday morning because while I finished it with minutes to spare on Friday afternoon, my boss emailed me to let me know that it didn’t appear to actually be working. Luckily, the fixes were small and even more luckily, the conference room at my office provides the perfect contained environment where my kids could play while I typed and tested madly.

I also broke down and bought myself some beauty accouterments today. One thing I failed to realize about my new hair cut is that while it looked lovely straight from the skilled hands of the stylist, once I got home, washed it, and let it dry on its own (my usual hair styling method), it looked like complete crap. It didn’t matter so much while I was sick because it only contributed to my overall air of decrepitude, but now that I appear to be on the mend, I figure that I have to see if I can reproduce what she did in the salon if I ever want to look decent again. But I’m not happy about it! I don’t want hair that I have to spend an hour fucking with before I can leave the house! I don’t want hair that requires beauty accouterments! Already this decision is wreaking havoc with my life as I ponder the ramifications. My hair is really thick so it FOREVER to blow it dry, which means that I’ll probably have to start showering at night. Except if I stop showering in the morning then I will no longer be showering after I work out, which means that I’ll be ripe all day.

I’m really pretty unhappy about this. Usually when I get a hair cut or get anything done to my hair I carefully explain that I do not have the time or inclination to spend an hour in front of the mirror every day and so whatever I end up with needs to be wash ‘n go. But this time I forgot. I was so distracted by the notion of getting rid of my damaged ends (and for free!) that I completely forgot to give my little speech and so now I’m stuck with the results. But I’m going to try to do right by my hair, at least for a little while. Maybe it’ll be easier than expected, maybe it’ll be more fun than it used to be, hell, maybe I’ll even derive some pleasure out of this process of making myself purty every day.

*sigh*

I’m so much sicker today, so sick that I can’t even be funny about it. Probably going to work was a bad idea, and I should have taken as my first clue the fact that after I walked two blocks to catch my bus, I had to sit with my head between my knees until the bus actually came because I was so overwhelmed with dizziness. But I have a big (huge) project due on Monday, first thing, and I was afraid that if I waited until this weekend I’d have questions that needed answering, the answers to which would be unavailable to me during non-business hours. So I braved my way to work, collapsed into my chair and told everyone that I was there to work on my project and my project alone and that they could try to talk to me about other things but I would only stare at them blankly and possibly drool because the tiny corner of my diseased brain that was still functioning had space only for my project and just barely that.

I made it through the day though, and I’m almost done with my project, close enough that I’m tempted to take tomorrow off because I’m guessing that I won’t make a miraculous overnight recovery, but still, I just can’t take the chance that I might not be able to finish. This project is a direct request from our Executive Director and while the organization for which I work is generally pretty casual and laidback when it comes to internal requests, when it comes to his requests it’s a sort of a he-says-jump-we-say-how-high scenario.

I hope I feel at least a little better tomorrow because if nothing else, I need to buy Easter candy to fill the plastic eggs I acquired last year on clearance for $.50 a bag and plan to sprinkle around my yard for my kids to joyfully discover on Sunday. Yes, the Easter Vernal Equinox Bunny of Fertility is on her way to our house, armed with baskets of chocolate and/or fake mustache filled (yes, really), petroleum derived missiles, just as nature intended.

Just to clarify, in case you were thinking that I hardly deserved to call myself a martyr after partying the previous night, I don’t actually have a hangover. That was just me using symbolism to demonstrate how crappy I feel. I can’t even immediately recall the last time I drank to the point of having a hangover…oh, no wait, I can…ah, good times!

But anyway, I think that I actually might have the flu, not a hangover. Unless the violent gnomes in my bed also liquored me up while I was sleeping last night, but I’m thinking the flu might be more likely.

I took some ibuprofen and I’m much, much less achy (although nothing seems to touch my aching head), which is pretty much the best gift I could have received today. I’m also no longer freezing…in fact, quite the opposite. I can feel the heat rolling through my body. Parts of my body covered in clothing are dripping with sweat. My cat actually got up and moved away from my because I was singing her fur. There are char marks on my sheets.

In five minutes I have to leave to go pick up my almost-two year old and I’m planning to pick myself up a milkshake on my way home. It’s the only thing that sounds remotely edible today and I think it might be just the ticket.

My five year old desperately wants to wear his ballet dance leggings today. After a lengthy and somewhat heated argument as to why I don’t think that is a good idea, he’s feeling fairly resigned about not getting to. A few minutes ago he was eating a little green jelly cup and asked me whether I was worried that he might spill that on his leggings and I concurred. I added that I was also concerned that he might run around and catch his leggings on something that would tear them. He nodded sagely, “Or I might catch on fire?”

Indeed.

Why am I having discussions about the potential perils that legging-clad five year olds face in the world at 11am on a Wednesday morning when I should be hunched over my computer screen scowling at code and he should be doing whatever it is he does at his preschool at 11am on Wednesday mornings? Because we are sick, that’s why. He seems perfectly fine outside of coughing up a lung every ten or so minutes but me, I woke up with the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life and after a two hour nap I am fairly convinced that little tiny gnomes hid under my covers and beat on me with their gnome clubs the entire time I was sleeping. My whole body hurts. My eyelids hurt. My eyelashes hurt. My fingernails hurt.

And I’m so cold! During my nap I couldn’t move because while the areas of my bed touching my body were relatively warm, the rest of my bed was composed of a sheet of ice. And when I climbed out of bed to go to the bathroom I immediately realized that some little hooligan had reset our thermostat from its usually moderate 68 degrees to a very unpleasant -10 degrees. It could be my sickness-inspired delirium, but I’m fairly certain I saw icicles hanging from the toilet.

And now my five year old is back with more unreasonable demands, this time for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because he’s hungry and it’s lunchtime. I managed to keep the whining out of my voice while asking if there was anything he could eat that didn’t require me getting out of bed, but neither of us could think of anything. So now I will go and brave sub-arctic conditions in my death-bed state because I am such a good mother.

I got my hair cut today. Yesterday — the whole weekend in fact — I was so unmotivated that I couldn’t even bring myself to post the entry I wrote about how unmotivated I was, but despite the fact that I couldn’t manage to complete anything useful like laundry or dishes or plucking my eyebrows, I still managed to complete a small and odd number of tasks including finally implementing GTD through my gmail account, the aforementioned discovery of how to finally get PHP working on my computer, and scheduling a hair cut for myself.

The hair cut was kind of a big deal. There was a time, post-newborn and pre-breakup, that I actually put some effort into my hair. I had it cut in a cute style and I regularly had it highlighted with bright red and blond streaks. I felt happy with my hair and even a little vain about how cute it looked.

But then I moved to my current city and suffered through a bad hair cut and worse dye job and have pretty much ignored my hair ever since. It grows longer and my brown roots dominate my stripey ends and all I ever do is wash it, condition it heavily (the ends are so damaged from the repeated foilings that I must use massive conditioner if I ever want to see my brush again), pick through it while it’s wet (never brush wet hair, my mother the hairdresser admonished me endlessly), part it on the side and leave it. Maybe if I’m feeling really motivated and want to feel pretty I’ll brush it at some point through the day (once it’s dry, of course), but even before I can tuck it back to its usual spot behind my ears, it’s back to its tangled nest of slightly frizzy, straight, thick hair.

I hate it, but what can I do? I like having longish hair (a few inches below my shoulders currently) and the only thing I can think to do with it is dye it because there’s no way in hell I’m getting up early to style my hair. I graduated from all that bullshit when I graduated from high school and there’s no way I’m going back. But more dye equals more damage and I’m already sad about this frizzed blondish mess that encompasses the bottom eight or so inches of my hair. However, something had to be done. It’s getting long enough that the length in combination with the damaged ends makes it truly impossible to manage (even my minimal “management”) and not to be excessively vain, but when my hair is long and not dyed, it’s so very sleek and shiny! I miss my sleek shiny hair.

A while back I stumbled across an ad for a free hair cut on craigslist. A salon was looking for hair models upon whom their stylists could demonstrate particular techniques. Yesterday while I was imagining all the ways I might make use of a personal assistant and was, among other things, imagining how I might have my assistant locate and make an appointment for me at a well reputed salon, it occurred to me that these craigslist model requests might be just the ticket so I decided to peruse the ads again and hope for the best. I figured I was up for pretty much anything. It couldn’t be worse than my current ‘do and it was the perfect price. If you can’t have an appointment made by your personal assistant at a well reputed salon, then what could be better than a free hair cut at a salon that at least requires their stylists to be competent enough to recruit strangers off the internet?

So I searched for ads and subscribed to the search feed (did you know that you can do that? You can do a craigslist search and then subscribe to the results so that anytime an ad is posted that meets your criteria, it shows up in your feed reader? So useful!) and within a few hours someone had posted needing a model for today at 11am. I sent her a quick email describing my hair, she called me and confirmed that my hair sounded perfect, and voila, the appointment was made.

My coworkers were dubious, but like I said, anything was better than what I had, I was more than willing to subject my hair to the mercies of a random craigslist hair stylist.

At promptly 11am, I showed up this fancy downtown spa/salon that was way, way out of my league. They brought me to a room where I was supposed to put on a robe and it was only in the nick of time that I realized it was meant to go over my clothes. I felt so huge and dowdy in comparison to all these tiny, primped, made up, coifed 20 year olds (girls and boys) dressed in their fashionable little clothes, calling each other “doll” while smiling in the most sincerely fake manner possible. But I was there and I was going to get my hair cut, damnit, regardless of whether their robes didn’t quite fit or their chairs were just a little too snug or their magazines just a little too…I don’t know, but until today I’m pretty sure I’d never opened an issue of Glamour in my life.

And get my hair cut I did. Despite any misgivings my coworkers might have had about hair stylists who advertise on craigslist, the stylist did an amazing job. She’s been doing hair for about four years but is only in her second year of apprenticeship with this particular salon. She had a senior stylist checking in occasionally but I could tell she was doing an excellent job regardless, thanks to many, many years of subjecting my head to the ministrations of my mother. When she was done I couldn’t believe how my hair looked. She cut off a couple inches of the bad ends and layered the bottom and layered the hair around my face. It’s still long but it looks so styled. I still have my blond and reddish ends but because of the layers you can see the brown beneath so it looks intentional, like I did it that way to highlight the texture of the layers. It looks so pretty! I had no expectation of looking pretty. I had no expectation of anything other than my hair would be easier to brush. It shocks me every time I look in the mirror. And best of all, she wants me to come back in April when she needs to demonstrate some color techniques.

So there you have it, the story of my hair cut. A complete treat, entirely unintentionally.

I got PHP running on my laptop!!

The problem turned out to be really simple, I had merely neglected to start Apache, but I learned quite a few things about my Mac as I worked my way toward that discovery.

The other day at work we were discussing Microsoft products and I realized that, much to my surprise, I know very little about Windows. Until I started working in IS, I had pretty much always been a personal Mac user and a professional Windows users and I felt that my knowledge of each was pretty comparable (and, at the time, I felt that my knowledge was fairly extensive, at least significantly more extensive than the typical end user).

These days I know a lot more about computers than I ever used to, but while my knowledge of the Mac OS, linux and UNIX have grown exponentially, my Windows knowledge has pretty much stagnated. When I first realized that I felt a little funny about it, but really, I guess that’s how I’d prefer it. I think that open source is the way of the future and while Microsoft might disagree with my assessment, Windows already feels like a dinosaur to me. Even OS X is only something I’m using because I already happen to have it and because it’s already ingrained into my life (and because my UNIX knowledge is directly applicable). I’m pretty sure that my son will require a computer relatively soon after he starts school and there’s no question that it will be running linux (and that I’ll probably build it!).

I used to think that I knew quite a lot about computers (and indeed, as I mentioned, compared to the average user I did), but now I know so, so, so much more (and am all the more aware of what I don’t know). It feels really quite amazing.

Last night I was going through some old files and I came across a little perl script that a guy I was dating showed me how to write. Way back then I had a million questions and never did understand exactly why it was written the way it was. Last night as I looked over it I was completely shocked to realize that I did understand it, that my daily exposure to PHP made the structure and syntax quite clear. With no small amount of relief I realized that I’m learning more than I realized and that there may be hope for me yet.