You Ain’t Missing Me At All

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This is why I am terrible at keeping a blog—because I fail to update it. The problem is, I think of all my best material while I am driving, and then forget to write it down when I get home. They need an app that begins recording when you start talking to yourself. And it needs to be voice-activated so you don’t have to operate your phone while driving, thus turning you into both a road hazard and an asshole. I guess there would have to be a code word or phrase to let the app know you’re talking to it and not to another person. For me it’d be something like, “goddamn motherfucking moron,” because then it would always be on when I’m driving, ready to record my random musings.

Excuses, excuses. I’ve also had real paying work to do, and then we moved, and then I had to spend over an hour this morning clearing space on my iPhone so I could update to iOS 8, which means the only music I now have on my phone is Raffi and Casper Babypants. Raffi is to Calvin what Ani DeFranco was to all 10th grade girls in the mid ‘90s. Raffi truly gets what it’s like to be him. He is that little white whale on the go. And no, he doesn’t know how oats and beans and barley grow, but does anyone? Like, whatever. You wouldn’t understand.

Now we’re in a rental house that hasn’t been substantially updated since it was built in 1954, so it has a few quirks. Like there are no exhaust fans in the bathrooms, so they always smell a little like poop.

Freelancing hasn’t completely degenerated into a Candy Crush marathon, but that’s partially because I am stuck on Level 400 (I covered a lot of ground during my three days of labor with Calvin, so stop judging me). Also I continue to be asked to take on new projects, which is great, if also presenting an ongoing challenge to my secret desire to be a complete hermit and never have to wear real pants.

I guess I’ll just have to find some blog post topics on the internet, at least once I exhaust all pet-related themes. Potential topics I’ve already considered and rejected:

  • Ebola: Meh. Is anyone else far less concerned about Ebola given the fact that it doesn’t cause reanimation of the brain stem after a person dies?
  • Mid-term Elections: I live in Georgia, where our state politics tend to be scarier than if the Ebola virus actually was airborne and did cause corpses to rise from the dead with a hankering for human flesh.
  • ISIS: Ranks higher than Ebola but lower than current Republican politics on the “Shit That Makes Me Wonder if I Should Have Brought a Child into this World Scale.”
  • Renee Zellweger’s Face: I once knew a woman who had had so much plastic surgery, she looked like the mayor of Whoville. There has to be some kind of pathology there, or at least an addiction to pain killers.
  • NCAA Football Play-Offs: Subjective selections determined by a small committee of questionably informed individuals intended to create marginal enhancements to a capricious system devised by an institution that relies upon public deception, arbitrary application of rules, and taking advantage of those it claims to protect to further its own financial gains—Condoleezza Rice should fit right in!

I’ll have to spend some quality time with the DVR tonight catching up on episodes of The Daily Show to learn of other current events on which I should form cursory opinions. I’m also like four episodes behind on Scandal, so I may not have time to post again for another month. My devoted audience of zero will have to endure.

It Took Three Whole Days Before I Started Blogging About My Pets

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Leo ate the Z key on my laptop. That has to be a metaphor for something. Or maybe it’s just been Leo’s lifelong dream to stop me from realizing my lifelong dream. He is that kind of cat. The asshole kind.

Sometimes when I’m making a sandwich I’ll give Leo a piece of cheese to distract him from manically licking the outside of the package of turkey, and invariably one of the dogs will use his millions-of-years-of-evolution-honed skills to sense the distribution of human-grade food and come running from whatever couch cushion he was planted on to protest the unfairness. That’s the message they convey through their expressions—Oliver’s one of childlike perplexity; Whiskey’s rooted in his profound belief in justice—that this unequal opportunity for processed provolone is unfair.

Unfair. This, from two dogs who sleep on a Westin Heavenly mattress; who spend one day a week at doggy day-camp frolicking in splash pools and sniffing dozens of dog butts; whose only responsibility in life is to make absolutely certain the  UPS delivery man does not murder us in our sleep. It is unfair that the cat gets to lick a miniscule piece of cheese until it is dried up and stuck like plaster to the granite countertop.

I don’t think cats have a sense of fairness. Cats are essentially shameless. The entire existence of YouTube is based on our collective marveling at the absence of humility amongst the feline species. I’ve lived with cats my whole life, and I’ve been privileged many a time to one of them joining me in a room, contorting into a position straight out of the Kama Sutra, and then engaging in a thorough and vigorous cleaning of his taint. Cats will stare you down while digging their claws into the purple tweed chair you bought two years ago after fantasizing about owning a purple chair for like a decade. Cats will leave you to sleep cold and alone all night and then curl into a warm, purring cuddle-ball under your chin three minutes before your alarm goes off. And then they will burrow into the coziest possible nest of pillows and covers in your bed while you get ready for work, occasionally parting one eyelid and giving you a slight nod just so you are made fully aware of what you are missing. Dogs can be jerks, but cats are dicks.

And that’s how it should be. Because if dogs woke up one day and decided to be as self-interested and violent as most cats, the results would be pretty severe. If I chose not to give Leo the piece of cheese, and instead tossed him onto the kitchen floor like he deserves, the worst he could do beyond destroying all of my furniture is ninja-attack my ankles. Which he does a lot, usually at night when I’m going to the bathroom, so I know it’s annoying, but it’s unlikely to warrant medical attention. The worst my dogs could do is kill me. They could watch me give cheese to the cat and then refuse to give cheese to them, and they could just be like, well, this is the last straw, the final stroke of injustice, and with one meaningfully exchanged look and a sigh of resignation, they could relieve me of my essential organs in like 20 seconds.

But then the provolone would still be on the kitchen counter, and Ollie has hip displaysia and can’t jump too high, and Whiskey has issues with spatial problem-solving, so they might still be screwed out of their treat. Leo would most certainly take one look at the carnage and trot into the bedroom to puke up cheese on my pillow and then curl up tight for super-cozy nap. So maybe God had a plan after all. He gave us dogs, big and strong and totally lacking in self-awareness, and he gave us cats, small and feisty and super good at getting cozy.

After I'm done being super cozy in this dog bed, I am going to scratch the shit out of that chair.

After Leo is done being super cozy in this dog bed, he’s going to scratch the shit out of that chair.

2,920 days straight of not letting the UPS man murder our entire family.

Oliver is celebrating 2,920 days straight of not letting the UPS man murder our entire family.

Could write a five-volume history of the canine justice system. Can't walk through half-open doors.

Whiskey could write a five-volume history of the canine justice system, but he can’t walk through half-open doors.

Bad Ass Mother

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I have an over-developed sense of shame. It probably comes from having had an extremely judgmental mother. I avoid all possible chances of hearing the word “no”, because a restaurant being out of ketchup is a personal rejection. I replay scenes of possible humiliation in my mind over and over, and everything is fodder for the nightly rumination: being wrong, being right in the wrong way, laughing too loud, not laughing when it’s funny, not being funny, being funny in a way no one else gets because I probably mumbled the punchline.  My Sympathetic Cringe Reflex (SCR) means I also feel other people’s shame deeply, to my core, even when they don’t feel ashamed at all by the fact that the waiter gave them sweet potato fries instead of a side-salad, and they don’t even apologize six times when they ask the waiter to go ahead and bring the salad that they ordered.

I was hoping that motherhood would mean I would start giving less of a shit, and I would say that so far it has certainly helped. Things I have done since becoming a mother that I probably would not have done before:

  • Attend a free demonstration toddler music class even though I didn’t know anyone else who was going to be there.
  • Call to make pediatrician appointments on the phone.
  • Give Calvin an apple to eat while still at Whole Foods without first running over to the check-out line to pay for it and then brandishing the receipt to every single store employee I encountered in the aisles lest they think I stole it or was just too entitled to think I had to pay for things like apples because honestly what other types of people shop at Whole Foods but self-absorbed apple freeloaders.

So basically motherhood as turned me into Don Draper.

(Don Draper without the day drinking and chain-smoking and infidelity, that is. Just the part of Don Draper who, that time in the first season when Pete said something like, “I despise you!”, glanced at Pete and said in a perfect dead-pan: “I don’t even think about you.”).

It’s definitely for the best. Before Calvin was born, one of my biggest fears relating to the Zombie Apocalypse was that I would be too polite and worried about what the other survivors thought of me to be of any real use when it came to things like scavenging for food or killing murderous bands of human outlaws. Now I would totally bite out this guy’s jugular if he was threatening my child.

I am Mama Lioness, hear me ROAR!

Just maybe don’t hear me ask for ketchup.

The Crumbly Bits

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I have Writer’s Anxiety. It’s like writer’s block, but with more tummy aches. And jitteryness. Maybe that’s Writer’s Caffeine Overdose.

I’ve wanted this for years and years—decades? Since I was fourteen and spent the summer between eighth and ninth grades writing a really terrible novel. I started writing even before that, with really terrible short stories and fake memoirs. I used to be much more dedicated to writing than it recent years. So why now, with my brain so full of stale and crumbly ideas that have spent years expiring in my head, did I finally decide to go for it? A lot of reasons, of course, not the least of which (maybe the most of which) is that my husband said I could. Because someone has to pay the bills and all. Also because my job was boring me. It’s not the job’s fault. It was not actually a boring job. But bored is my default state of being. It would require a daily circus to keep me sufficiently entertained enough to do the basic functions of any job. So boredom + spousal permission* = the stuff dreams are made of. My dream, in its current variation, being to part-time write from home with some paying projects and some time just spent digging out the crumbly bits in my head and to part-time continue being a full-time caretaker to my son.

My home is not a circus, although it does occasionally resemble a zoo, or, more accurately, an animal shelter. It smells like the humane society more often than I actually notice. By the time I do notice, we’ve probably reached circus-floor level stench. We have four pets and a one year-old human child. That’s a lot of stink for a 2.5 bedroom bungalow. That’s about to be exploded into a 5 bedroom bungalow over the course of the next 6 months, so add that to the circus comparison. Maybe my life is a circus, in the strictest first-world-problems sense of the metaphor, although it doesn’t feel that way at all. It feels intensely—and increasingly—normal. No, I’ll be honest, it feels successful. I feel extraordinarily lucky. Like I keep rolling doubles in the board game Life. Did doubles even matter in that game? I can’t remember. I just remember little plastic station wagons filled with pink and blue pegs, and that getting a job like “banker” was preferable to “dog-catcher,” or something similar. I’ve got my station wagon and my blue pegs (and my four furry pegs) and I just got to trade in my first career pick for something much, much better.

So of course my response is anxiety. Because the only logical response to realizing you might have everything you’ve always wanted is to assume it will soon end in failure. The plastic car will veer off the color-coded path and fly over the edge of a cliff. Or I’ll just spend my days scrolling through Facebook and reading other people’s wildly successful blogs while intermittently staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page. No catastrophes. No cliffs. Just realizing that the thing I’ve been talking about doing for 20+ years is not actually the thing I want to do at all…or the thing I am any good at…or the thing I can force myself to focus on for more than five minutes.

And now I’m back to where I started.

 

*I should say support, because “permission” makes us sound like super-Baptists or something and we’re not super-Baptists or even regular Baptists or even Christians of any variety and we make very few decisions without the other’s thoughtful input, and by “thoughtful” I usually mean “wine-soaked.”