Happy Thanksgiving

Mignon is thankful for: scarves, seat heaters, sharp ice skates, health, good luck, scalding hot food, nice kids, the thing that allows me to play my iPod on the car stereo so that I don't have to listen to Jim's entire collection of live Dave Matthews and Bob Dylan which could take us all the way to Winthrop and back with just Disc 1 of each album. And my friends and family. They're really good too.

Madeleine is thankful for: "Pooey, rings (the playground kind), good people, PollyPockets and Playmobil and Plastics, my family"

Quinn is thankful for: "football, baseball, candy, cows, baby monkeys, beetles, owls, lizards, and I wish I had a flying donkey"

Next Pivotal Video Post

I'm always going to be someone's little sister.

I am not willing to go gentle into the night. I won't rage, but I will give getting old the finger.

I will hurl myself around a hockey rink and wear shiny lipgloss. I will pull my giant sweats down to my buttcrack and hunch my shoulders in a huge hoodie. I will say "retarded" and "cocksucker." I will read gossipy websites and text my friends. I will download Kanye and crank Alanis in the "when you fuck her" part. I will neglect thank you notes and RSVPs. I will go to TJ Maxx too often and eat instant cinnamon rolls.

But also I will show my daughter how to do a headstand. I will have a beer with friends on the back deck before a football game. I will join Facebook and reconnect with Fred. I will write funny and sad stories about being poor. I will skip making dinner when Jim's gone and take the kids to get burgers. I will make sand castles and ride water slides. I will watch Youtube videos of Ninja Warriors when I'm home alone. I will fart to make Quinn laugh.

I don't care if I'm young around my eyes and on the backs of my arms. I want to be young when it matters. For me, I guess, it also means being young when I shouldn't.

There's a lot going on here, but I finally get to a point at the end.

Over 15,000 people have watched a video I posted on Youtube a couple years ago. I also posted here, back then, but I think I may have taken it down, as it embarrassed Madeleine. It's a video of her singing a made-up song in her swimsuit. So last night I checked my Youtube account and found that it had become moderately popular. I had disabled comments and ratings, yet its viewership keeps climbing. Fifteen thousand people? Huh. Who woulda thought?

This is what I imagined for my blog, when I started almost 4 years ago. People would just show up. After two days (yes two days), I had received a couple spam comments, and knew it was time to revisit my business model. Hey look! No advertising budget! So I hit the airwaves, commenting here, there, saying clever things, being brash, clever. All the things that people love in one-line, self-absorbed comments. And then I waited some more. Still no customers at Chez My. I wrote some more. I thought some more about content. Less openingyourmind, more randomfunnytidbitsandlinks. Maybe a comment. Then I just said Fuck It. I gotta go door to door.

And I did. I went to a couple sites and made a couple sincere comments, and then ta-da. They came. Those two. But it was good. I made friends. At that point is wasn't about being all bloggity bloggity famous, it was about making some connections, because I had a teeny tiny baby and a 3-year-old, and I just needed some dialogue. It was great. Perfect. Jim totally didn't get it, the world chuckled at us bloggers and our "friendships" but I was sane and writing. And we appreciated each other, laughed and frowned together. Met each other in real life and hugged and laughed and frowned some more.

Flash forward three years, and I'm still blogging, but less so about the friendships and staying-sane-ships, more about writing, but it's okay. It's evolved. Except my real-life, real-world has hit a funky pot-hole. The kind of pot-hole wherein you actually have to stop the car and get out to make sure all the random pipes and black thingies under your car seems to be in the same intact random order. Looking under my car, I realized my real-life relationships had turned into the "revisiting the advertising budget" period in my blog life. I was being flip, brash and self-absorbed with my friends. I wasn't giving them and their problems the respect they deserved. I was going for the easy laugh, expecting them to not take things to personally, knowing my rapier-sharp wit was winning friends and influencing people.

Only it wasn't. I've been a jackass for the last 6 months. Maybe a year? I don't know what the hell I've been thinking these past several months, but whatever it was, it was clouded by shit, because I've had my head straight up my ass. I'm sorry to my friends and my family. I'm sorry to my husband and kids. I'm sorry to myself. But if we're not recognizing we're making mistakes, we're not getting better, so I've been thinking about that a little bit. Not dwelling on the mistake, so much, but the fix.

I think all this was prompted by a Prop 8 discussion board. Some religious loony couldn't let go of his Christian stranglehold on "truth" and "justice," as defined by his interpretation of the bible. I realized I'm just the type of atheist he was railing against. An individual with no defined and active sense of right and justice. Sure, I know what's right and wrong, but I want to be a woman with a moral compass that is inarguably precise.

If you're not a Christian, Buddhist, Wiccan, or whatever, you better at least live your life like you know what you're doing, or else the Atheist Police will come and peel your Darwin Fish right off the back of your Subaru. I don't have the Fish with Legs, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let them kick me out of the club. I know what's right and wrong, and I don't want to be wrong any more.

Hubba hubba

Thank you America, for making my newspaper look like this:



From here and here.

And this one. THIS ONE!


From this site, which has made me cry.

I don't know how it's happened, or what exactly is happening, but I feel like it's something big.

Just hang with me for a sec. I got a few things.

I can't write any more. I've completely lost it. Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah writers' block blah blah blah no inspiration, blah blah. No, it's not that. I just don't want to. I'm just pissed and irritated and hyper-critical and about as productive as Sarah Palin at the U.N. I have a pretty good start and something I like, but the thought of writing from point A to point B makes my brain go..... Just like that. That's what my brain does. I'm living in the space between the words right now. And they're angry crackling spaces.

I hate that Burger King commercial with the two Renaissance Fair guys singing to the ugly 70's guy. I hate it. It makes me angry, it's so repulsive.

I'm tired of submitting work and not hearing for more than 5 months. After that long, you gotta throw me a bone or something. Or a boner. Throw me a boner! That's better than a form letter and a "Sorry for the delay." I'd rather get a boner in the mail.

Madeleine's first grade teacher sucks. There. I said it. Madeleine dropped her head-band on the way out of class yesterday, and when I went back to retrieve it, Mrs. I said, "Oh yeah, I found it." She went back to her desk, reached down and pulled it out of the garbage and handed it to me.

In addition, Madeleine's new best buddy is a twin. He and his brother are not identical and are very different. Yet today, when I went in to help, after two months of teaching both these boys, Mrs. I still has to go back to their desks to read which is which before picking out one of them to do a project with me. The boys are half Filipino, and last week, instead of picking one of the twins, she grabbed an extremely tall Native American kid in the class, and only after he said, "I'm not Ricky," did she realize she had the wrong child.

Dude. She's not good. And her class smells like cheap candles, and the windows are open all the time, because, as she tells me often, she has frequent hot flashes. Dude. It's like 22 fucking degrees outside!

Also? This guy I went to high school with who friended me on Facebook is a serious asswipe. That's all the space he deserves. Can I un-friend him? He's probably everything I dislike in the male gender. And I think he whitens his teeth.

More? Okay.
Red wine is making me not sleep at night and have perverted dreams about inappropriate people. I'm constantly walking around tired and freaked out by what I did last night with the 80-year-old crossing guard.

How many times is it acceptable to ask one's spouse to not use my towel/toothpaste/deodorant/drink all the fizzy water? I have hiding spots for each of these. I feel like every day is an exercise in espionage as I eat breakfast and clean myself.

Why is my hair still falling out in spurts and shoots? The dog and I are battling to see who can carpet the dining room the fastest. He's got a slight advantage on volume, but I'm making it shag, baby.

Inhale, exhale, vote.

Treacherous.

Madeleine was punched in the face two weeks ago by another first grader. He hit her so hard her cheek swelled up and left a black and blue reminder for a week. She and Sean were playing some kind of aggressive chase game, which of course doesn't excuse his behavior, but explains where it came from, I guess. And when I say I'm explaining why he punched my little girl in the face, that is the nicest thing I can possibly come up with about the incident. I was ready to punch him in the face. I mean, fists flexed, jaw tight, lips pinched, ready. His blue eyes were big and he was talking talking talking about what happened, why he did it, what she did to him, etc etc etc, but I only remember her hand to her cheek, her face pressed into my stomach, my fists balled up, and, afterwards, carrying her the two blocks home. Trying to figure out why somebody would do that.

And then last week something worse happened. Her good friend was a snot and told Madeleine she was a baby during a playdate at the girl's house. I didn't know until the next day, because we had a busy evening, but the next day, when Madeleine asked her, point blank, why she didn't want to play with her any more, I could see her roll her eyes from across the playground and walk across the top of the play structure to another friend and whisper something in her ear. The other girl looked at Madeleine and they turned their backs on her. That girl, that scene. It was so much worse.

In fact, we're pretty much over the Sean thing. His mom called and was mortified and told me all the punishment he'd received (somebody else had told her what happened at the park). He's an okay kid, but clearly has some impulse control issues, and now we know.

But this other girl? I'm not a saint. Or maybe even a really nice person, because I never want to talk to her again and want terrible things to befall her. Things that don't cause bodily harm, but something really bad, nonetheless. I hope the back of her pants tear apart in the middle of a school assembly. I hope she barfs in front of a crowded lunchroom. I hope she's dumb. Do you have to take the high road when it comes to 6-year-olds?