Sticks and Stars

I subscribe to a magazine called Sculpture and my five year old has been lately pouring through the issues and asking me lots of questions about sculpture in general and the sculptures he’s seeing in particular. It makes me very happy, I must admit, to look with him at photos of these abstract, beautiful sculptures and to watch him respond. He asks me what they are and I tell him I don’t know what they are but to me they look like [insert my interpretation] and then I ask what they look like to him. His interpretation is always surprising and always reminds me how the meaning of “art” is truly in the eye of the beholder (and a five year old boy beholds much differently than his 31 year old mother).

My only wish is that I could find some examples of sculpture that would really engage him, that would tickle his five year old self. Then today on my lunch break I visited the public art gallery I regularly visit and was delighted to find the work of Dennis Oppenheim on display. With the exception of a few sculptors whose work I adore, I really know nothing about sculptors at all, and hadn’t even heard of Dennis Oppenheim until I saw his work today. But what child (or adult for that matter) could resist sculptures like this? Or this? Or this (does it not look the house has rolled up to take a sip??)?

We have a sculpture park in my city and I have yet to take my boys to visit. I’m thinking a picnic is in order.

Yesterday we put up a hummingbird feeder. I wasn’t sure whether we’d get any takers but one day I saw one flitting about in our yard so I figured it couldn’t hurt. Indeed, in the roughly twenty-four it’s been up, we’ve had at least six or seven visitors, most of which have come in the past two or so hours — and those are just the ones we’ve happened to notice. But oh my god are my boys thrilled when we catch one in the act. Someone shouts and everyone comes running to watch. Makes me smile every time.

- Yesterday I made smoothies for my boys for breakfast and I think it must be the first time I’ve made them in a while because they were thrilled about getting to have milkshakes for breakfast. I didn’t expect them to go over so well, especially not with my two year old, so I think these may become a recurring breakfast item. I always like when I can add some variety to our usual morning routine. (And as an aside, having a good blender truly makes all the difference).

- Yesterday I bought two more fitted sheets for the boys’ bunk beds. We only have two sheets (one for each bed) and my five year old sometimes has issues with keeping the bed dry, and when that happens and I don’t catch it in time I can’t put my two year old down in their room because there isn’t time to wash and dry the sheet before bedtime (especially not if I don’t catch it until bedtime). Since I’m guessing he’ll adapt to the new routine of not sleeping in my bed far better if I can actually make it a routine, I decided that new sheets were in order (especially once I saw them on sale at the store). I let my five year old pick out the colors and he immediately chose pink and then blue (I vetoed the blue because one of our existing sheets is blue), and followed that up with purple. He proudly exclaimed that girls like those colors but boys do too. Indeed!

- In terms of this morning’s planned fancy breakfast, one important aspect of making pancakes with apples and whipped cream is remembering that one does not have any electric means for whipping said cream. Perhaps I appreciate the cream more having whipped it by hand (and indeed, I at least now feel sure of my ability to whip cream pioneer-style). Further, I should remember that my two year old is a fickle, fickle beast and just because he happily ate spoonfuls of the freshly whipped cream and slices of the sticky, sweet cinnamon apples, does not mean that he would like a pancake topped with either, and certainly not with both.

- In honor of once again having to clean my floors myself, I broke out my roomba from the closet where it had been temporarily interred. For those of you who think the roomba is a gimmick, let me be the first to say that I love my roomba. It does an excellent job and it does a far better job than I would do because it actually goes under the couch and bed and whatnot, places that I would never touch. If I run the roomba every few days (I have four rooms in which to run it, so maybe every day but rotating it through the rooms), tidy up at night, do the dishes after dinner and use Saturday mornings (pre-ballet) to do any catch up, then I should be able to keep my house clean…enough.

- My only remaining task for today is to make vegetable soup. I wasn’t planning on another soup-of-the-week (although I accidentally made one a couple of weeks ago for which I’ve been meaning to post the recipe because it was insanely tasty) but I have all these half used bags of frozen veggies in the freezer and I was thinking I should do something with them and in light of the fact that I’m blowing the shit out of my budget for the month, it seemed like I should also do something that will help with the non-lunch-purchasing effort, so voila, veggie soup of the week.

- And now I need to start getting shit together for a trip we are to embark upon next weekend. We are headed with my family to a resort the next state over. Pony rides, mini-golf, hot spring pools with water slides and, perhaps most important, a glorious full-service spa. My brother is excited about the golf course (real, not mini), my dad is looking forward to the casino, but me, I just want someone to rub me down and make my toes purty.

I wish I had better plans for the weekend…or really any plans for the weekend, but I do not, unless making buttermilk pancakes topped with sauteed apples and whipped cream for breakfast counts…and I admit that I am kind of excited about that. Usually our weekend mornings allow no time for lingering breakfasts (Saturday is ballet, Sunday is early grocery shopping to avoid the crowds) but this weekend we have a whole extra morning, and a half-pint of heavy cream and a couple of apples that need to be eaten. So the stars are aligning to place a very tasty breakfast on the table Monday morning.

I know I recently mentioned that I was feeling better, that my funk seemed to be subsiding, but that turned out to be a lie. And of course, my lack of energy means that I don’t get anything done, which only makes me feel worse. Tonight, though, assuming I can make myself do it, I am determined to get my house tidied, dishes done, laundry done, and a few miscellaneous paperwork tasks taken care of. If I do all that, then it will be perfectly acceptable for me to wallow in self-pity for the rest of the weekend, and perhaps some extended wallowing is just what I need. I have a new book to read, the latest disc of Battlestar Galactica arrives in my mailbox today, and my son and I are working our way through his new video game (Curious George, if you were…curious), so really, all I’m missing is something sweet and/or salty to snack on.

On a completely different note, I was checking out the website for my son’s soon-to-be elementary school to see if they had information about their PTA or Site Council or whatever the hell iteration they have, and noticed they had an announcement for their monthly “White Privilege Family Film Night.” I think this school and I are going to get along just fine.

What I really, really want to blog about is the intense frustration I’m experiencing when attempting to work with the guy who replaced me in my old position, but I can’t because a) I’m sure that you don’t give a shit, and b) if you do, by chance, give some small amount of shit, you certainly don’t give a shit about his and my arguments about referential data integrity and the finer points of SQL query structure. Let’s just suffice it to say that if you are looking at data for a group of 200 people, and you want to know how many of them have, say, brown eyes, it’s not acceptable to get 964 as a result. Does it not seem entirely clear that saying, “Out of 200 people, 964 of them have brown eyes,” just doesn’t make sense?!? Am I the only one who understands that you can’t have more brown eyed people than you have actual people?!?!?! The problem comes when I point this out to him and he shrugs and says, “Well, that’s what I get,” as if, well, sure, it makes no sense, but it’s what my peak-of-perfection query returned so it must be right.

So anyway, what I will write about instead is my new ploy to make friends. As I believe I’ve said before, I am a lonely girl. And what’s even worse (and presumably much of the reason for my loneliness), I am a shy, introverted, insecure girl who sometimes convinces myself that no one would ever want to be my friend for many varied reasons depending on the day and my mood and what I hate about myself at that particular moment. So despite the fact that I want to make friends, I find it really, really difficult to actually do so (and so much easier to just feel sorry for my lonely self instead).

Inspiring to me is a friend who is amazingly socially inept, but who, after his wife divorced him, decided to make friends. He saw a therapist and she gave him instructions to follow in order to take a step-by-step approach to becoming more socially comfortable and he did it and the last time I hung out with him I was amazed at how relaxed he was, and even better, how friendly and nice he seemed instead of his previous silent-and-grumpy self (which was really just shy-and-awkward in disguise). This morning in the shower I was feeling sorry for myself and wishing that I could find a therapist who could help me become more socially comfortable and make friends and then I started thinking about the steps he went through and whether I could do them myself and I realized, surprise surprise, that I could.

Part of my problem (outside of the shyness, insecurity, yada yada yada) is that I kind of have too high of standards when it comes to making friends. Not that I think I’m too good for people (well…not exactly anyway), it’s more that I have this idea that I shouldn’t bother to make friends with anyone who isn’t my ideal dream BFF because well, what’s the point, right? So then I bitch to myself about how there’s no one to be friends with because I never meet any queer, fat, politically radical, single women who are parenting small children and who else could I possibly be friends with?!? It’s very important that one’s friends be as close to a clone of oneself as possible, no?

Also in the shower this morning, I realized that this notion might be a bit, shall we say, silly.

So then I started thinking about the friend-making opportunities that stare me in the face every day and imagined myself actually making the best of them and what that might look like. Small steps is the key.

1) There’s a woman at my bus stop every morning who appears to be roughly my age. We smile at each other and say hi and wish each other a good day, but that’s it. I could introduce myself to her and make further small talk. (I imagined doing so this morning and almost did it except that while it’s usually just her and I at the bus stop, this morning there was an odd parade of about fifteen other random people and that just threw everything off).

2) There’s this woman I work with who has an open house at her house every month and I always mean to go but never do. I could actually go, which would be the first step toward bumping her and my work friendship to something that extended outside the boundaries at work.

3) There’s a (single) woman I work with who recently adopted a toddler and whenever I hear anyone ask how things are going, her response of, “Good! Everything is good!” sounds to me a lot like, “Oh my fucking god what the hell was I thinking?!?!” I’ve been thinking for weeks that I should ask her to have lunch with me so she can really talk about parenting because I know that for me, being able to talk about the hellishness that can be parenting, and parenting solo in particular, is kind of key to being able to ever look adoringly at my little beasts.

I must say that each opportunity I list above feels terrifying and vomit-inspiring. The last one in particular makes me feel faint even, until I remember that this is just a blog entry and I don’t actually have to do it. Hell, I can even tell you all lies about how I did do it and it went off without a hitch because while I feel intensely socially awkward, the reality is that I am this amazingly charismatic individual who draws people to her in an almost unnaturally magnetic manner.

But lying about it on my blog does not actually result in any friends, so that’s probably not the path I’ll take.

I’m feeling better today. I started feeling better yesterday and noted to myself that it seems this bout of low-energy-downness lasted about two weeks. Seems like a good idea to make a note of these things so that I can know whether another one is coming. It’s also just about time for me to bleed, and who knows, that could be part of it as well.

As an aside, I will note that I continue to feel generally bitchy and impatient (although that may well just be part of my personality) and in the spirit of bitchiness, let me just say that it really annoys me when women say things like, “I’m just about to start my cycle,” or “I was on my cycle at the time,” etc. You are always “on your cycle.” That’s why it’s called a cycle, because you are constantly cycling through. (And as a further aside, if any of you have said this, I forgive you because I love you and you know that when I’m commenting on the general stupidity of the human population, you are of course exempt because your intelligence is so clearly demonstrated by the blogs you choose to read).

In other news, a fifteen year old boy keeps sending text messages to my cell phone. For a long time I ignored him figuring that he’d realize by the lack of response to his cleverness (”kels rox ur sox!”) that he had the wrong person. And then last week he asked if I was coming to his party (”kels rox ur sox!”) so I finally behooved myself to send him a nice message explaining that I don’t know him so he should stop sending me messages. He responded by insisting that he does know me and he proved it by telling me my name (Zoe). I did not bother to respond figuring that one day he might actually converse with the real Zoe and she’d confirm that she’s not receiving his messages, but then on Sunday he sent me an actual photo (two even — thus confirming for me his status as a fifteen year old boy) and the regular text messages continue (”kels rox ur sox!”). I feel like I should do something about this but I’m afraid he’ll be mean to me if I address him more firmly and since I never even come remotely close to using up my allotted text messages in a month, it feels easier to let it continue to be this minor irritation.

But speaking of irritations, I must say that I’m about at the end of my rope with the guy who replaced me in my last position. He’s three months in now, a point at which I had pretty well mastered the job despite coming in with negligible SQL knowledge, and yet he can barely be trusted with the simplest task. I give him a task, something that should take him ten minutes at most, and hours later he asks me a question that clearly indicates he hasn’t gotten anywhere. Then, after I walk him through it step by step and then send him on his way, he calls me over to check his work and we have to go through it all over again because it’s entirely, entirely wrong. I wouldn’t care so much except that when he doesn’t get his work done and he comes up against deadlines, I’m the one who has to step in and do it for him so that the deadlines are met.

In less gripey news, I just got my five year old into a very cool summer camp program that I’ve been trying to get him into for months. He’ll be taking a field trip every week, going swimming every week, and going to the park every week, and best of all, it’s maybe four blocks from my house and is about $100 a month cheaper than what I pay for his preschool. I think he’ll be sad to not see his preschool friends any more, but I also think he’ll have a better time. And this program becomes his after school program once he starts school, so yay for easier transitions!

I’ve been feeling pretty blue for the past couple weeks…bluer since that stupid housekeeping fiasco even though it truly is stupid and shouldn’t matter…but it still does. A friend says she’s tired of watching me cycle up and down and that I should look into medication (okay, perhaps she didn’t exactly put it like that) but although I am noticing that my ups and downs do tend to be cyclical, I’m pretty sure that everyone cycles up and down and my own cycles are no more extreme than those that everyone else experiences. I think I just might bitch about it more.

The blueness is the reason why those of you to whom I owe emails have not received them. On the best of days I am a terrible email slacker and would greatly prefer that you psychically intuit my well meant responses, but when I’m feeling down and without energy that whole business is magnified exponentially.

Today is a very sunny and hot day and I hoped that maybe my low mood was a result of clouds but I’m still feeling low. I did, however, take the self-preserving step of getting my house clean before ballet this morning (despite the class starting at 9:45am, I had already been up for hours). I realized that that’s an excellent time to get shit done and indeed, despite the fact that I still feel low, my house is clean and that makes me feel better.

Work continues to go well. I met with my boss last week about how to handle the backlog of work piling up behind the guy they hired to replace me in my old position and during the conversation he casually mentioned that he thinks I’m brilliant. That certainly made me preen just a little. I think that “brilliant” might be excessive, but I do think I’m good at my job. And of course, the fact that I love it doesn’t hurt.

I wish I didn’t find my children’s voices to be so insanely grating when I’m feeling blue. Their normal voices are fine, but when they whine or scream or when, say, my five year old calls me a stupid jackass I look quite longingly at the roll of duct tape sitting on my counter. The effort to get my two year old to sleep in his own bed is stalled pretty much exactly where I thought it would stall. It takes me about two hours to get him to fall asleep in his bunk bed and he sleeps there until about 3am when he crawls back in bed with me, and then he gets me up for good at somewhere between 5am and 6am. I have, however, starting making my morning workout non-negotiable. That means he stands there and cries (screams) during at least three quarters of it, but I figure that he’ll eventually understand that too bad, I’m going to do it anyway, so he might as well find a more useful way to spend his time.

Now it’s time to embark on a Chocolate Chip Cookie Parade, something my five year old has been excited about for the whole week. If you are unaware, a Chocolate Chip Cookie Parade consists of a) making chocolate chip cookies, b) carrying them around the house while singing, and c) eating them. This event was conceived of entirely by my five year old; I am merely assisting with the implementation. Perhaps there are better ways to spend a hot sunny day than hunched over a hot oven, but if there are cookies involved then it’s pretty much all worthwhile.

Oh, and one more thing. McDonalds’ new espresso drinks? Not good at all (as I fully expected, but I had a free coupon and needed some coffee this morning). Just to warn you if you should find yourself tempted.

A crazy thing — no, make that two crazy things — happened over the weekend and I am feeling hugely overwhelmed. I can’t even blog about them, which is usually a huge stress reliever, so instead I’m feeling intensely anxious all day long and following my days with long nights of tossing and turning.

Don’t worry, neither is anything bad. One of them, in fact, could be quite amazingly good, but at the moment both are little more than things to worry and stress about. The fact that I can do absolutely nothing about them does little to help.

But having these two big things on my mind is making me feel very overwhelmed in my daily life. And of course, being overwhelmed means that I cannot attend to all the little normal things that are piling up, like email and dishes and library books and whatnot. And of course, not attending to those things means that I am feeling all the more overwhelmed.

Tomorrow I should be insanely tired, so that should make things much better. Definitely fish sticks for dinner.

This feels like another low energy weekend. Aside from the usual, the only task on my list is making banana bread and even that feels too onerous. I had planned to go nursery shopping since it’s now mid-May and all the best annuals should be in stock, but when I came to the driveway of the nursery after ballet dance class this morning I just kept driving. Even the thought of getting my boys into a cart felt like too much.

Plus I discovered much to my immense shock that if I wanted to, I could become a homeowner again right now, and that’s kind of distracting me from thoughts of further improvement on my current place. Although I felt quite turned off of homeownership after owning (and then selling) my own home, being on my own and determining my own priorities made me realize that indeed, I do want my own home again, a little place that I can transform in whatever manner I see fit, a stable base of operations for my little family. Initially I thought that a condo would be perfect so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the hassles of a yard, but now that I’m living in a place with a yard I recognize that yes, this is really what I’d rather have. Nothing too big, nothing that requires a riding mower (or hell, even a gas mower), but just a space where I can see some dirt and some green things sprouting from it.

Homeownership in my city is not for the faint of finances though. Prices are high here. You’d be lucky to find a two bedroom, TLC-requiring starter home (likely built in the ’40s) in an outlying neighborhood (i.e. not the neighborhoods that are people’s first choice but are still in the city limits) for less than about $325,000. If you want the same thing in a trendier neighborhood you could easily add $75,000 to the price. While I aspire to homeownership, there’s no way in hell I could afford the mortgage on $325,000 and it’ll be a long ass time before I can come up with even a 10% down payment, not to mention 20% in order to secure a better interest rate. I figured that I’d save money when possible and hope for some sort of massive salary increase and/or inheritance that would make this all possible and content myself with renting in the meanwhile.

However, yesterday for some reason I started thinking about first time home buyer programs (which I won’t technically be until I haven’t owned a house for three years) and in a moment of internet boredom, I decided to check them out. Much to my complete surprise, I discovered that my city offers programs for people who make less than 80% of the area median income (aka, me), that provide down payment assistance, low interest mortgages, and price-reducing subsidies toward the purchases of homes priced at less than $360,000. Based on what I read, I could buy a $350,000 home and wind up with mortgage payments only a little higher than what I pay for rent. I’m not a first time home buyer but there are some exceptions for single parents and for people who buy in “target” areas (aka, the more diverse neighborhoods where I’d rather live anyway).

This is quite a lot for me to think about. I am actually in a good place to buy right now (or I will be come October when my lease is up). I have a good job, good credit, and a little money saved toward a down payment. And in fact, I need to buy fairly soon because it won’t be long until I actually surpass 80% of the area median income (but only just barely) and would no longer qualify for these programs. I emailed a realtor who works specifically in this area and he’s going to get me some more information, and next week I’m going to attend a class that begins the process for accessing these funds. I don’t know what I’m going to do (and I don’t even need to decide for a few months), but it doesn’t hurt to figure out my options and get my ducks in a row.

I wanted to be a homeowner but I was pretty realistic about the possibility of that ever happening, at least without the aforementioned massive salary increase and/or inheritance. I am blown away by the possibility that it could happen as soon as five months from now.

A few minutes ago he came up to me holding out his arms and said, “On hut!! On kiss!!” (which means “Want hug! Want kiss!” for those of you who do not speak Two). The he proceeded to play his favorite game in which he points at a part of my body and I singsong, “Mama’s [body part],” then he points to the same part on himself and I again label it, and then he races off to where his brother is soundly sleeping (late sleeper, that one) and although I can no longer see what he’s doing, I call out the same label for his brother’s part, which is apparently correct because he then races back to me to begin the process again. He was absolutely ecstatic when I showed him that our cat has the very same variety of identifiable parts. I don’t think the cat was as thrilled though.

And just like his brother before him (and presumably, two year olds everywhere), the thing he says the very most is, clear as a bell, “Mama, what’s that?” And he says it over and over and over and over and over (and over and over and over).

Terrible twos my ass. Sure there’ve been some tantrums (and likely many more to come) but two is so much funnier and sweeter and sillier and smarter than one, how could anyone call it terrible?