Blog Housecleaning

I'm sure you will all be deeply relieved that I have changed the time zone on my blog to reflect that I am, in fact, back home in Maryland. Or, you know, it could only be a relief to my husband, who is nitpicky rarely but very persistently and who has reminded me roughly 5 times a day all week that my time zone is wrong. There you go, honey.

I just checked and all my old posts were bumped up three hours. It can't take into account the possibility that you might change timezones at some point and maintain the old time stamps? Now I look even crazier, posting about nothing at 2:30am (when really, that post was entered at 11:30pm, a much more normal rambling hour).

One more blog note - I see AdSense has finally forgiven last week's fumbling and my ads are now content driven instead of boringly all about blogging. No wonder Google's doing so well, they make advertising entertaining. The ones I just saw were for sleep aids. Wish they'd picked up during the Home Depot step-in-poo story, but I'm happy they're here nonetheless.

I'm becoming my mother

Actually, that's not true. I was going to say I'm becoming my mother because I keep losing things, but the thing I have currently lost is my birth certificate, and there's no way my mother would EVER lose a birth certificate. She loses things like keys and glasses, often while they are on her person, but she has a filing system so regimented the Dewey Decimal System looks like chaos beside it. She has helped me file in the past, so I have all kinds of neatly labeled folders (one for each individual piece of paper, practically), but of course many of the papers have wandered away in the intervening time, and one of the wanderers is my birth certificate, which I need. I need my birth certificate so I can get a passport so I can go to Italy. I must go to Italy.

I know I saw the stupid thing recently. I have spent the whole day tearing apart the house looking for this one piece of paper, and the kids have kindly contributed by also tearing the house apart in mute (oh how I wish it were really mute) protest of my single-mindedness. The messes at adult height are all of the ransacked-paper-tray variety. The under-four-foot messes resemble the handiwork of insane but resourceful monkeys. I just took a 5 minute break from my obsessive search to clear a path through the dining room and, among other things, had to separate rice from playdoh.

Break over, back to the search.

Late night angry musings of a sleep hoarder

I remember insomnia from years ago - lying in bed growing more and more awake, body growing twitchy with the need to give up, get up, even though I knew it meant a long hard day. I remember late college nights spent frantically typing next-day-due papers, cursing myself for procrastinating again, feeling my words get clumsier as sleep pulled harder and harder at my eyes and brain. I remember, more vaguely, getting up with my first son during his first few weeks, and not minding at all - he seemed such a miracle, I couldn't get enough of him, and my brain was rendered pretty much useless by that point anyway, so sleeplessness didn't make me noticeably more fuzzy. Of course, he started sleeping through the night at two months, just in time for me to go back to work, proving himself to be the miracle I thought he was.

Then there was my second son. The one playing happily next to me right now, at 2:36, while everyone else sleeps. The one who is almost two years old and who is darling and sweet and good except when it comes to sleep. He has never been a reliable sleeper. For his first eight months, he literally never slept in stretches longer than two hours. And neither did I. I know, all mothers have sleepless horror stories, but this nearly killed me outright. I couldn't speak clearly, I certainly shouldn't have been driving (but did anyway, of necessity - questioning in my moments of lucidity how it was even useful to anyone to force new mothers back to work before they have any hope of being productive), I was mean as a snake and hated everyone - the baby only slightly less than myself.

He finally did learn to sleep, and I slowly, grudgingly forgave him for almost destroying my sanity, but ever since those awful long dark nights, I have a new relationship with sleep. I am jealously protective of my rest now in a way I certainly was not in those days of insomnia and overdue term papers and college parties. I bitterly resent any and all interruptions of my sleep, even though I know rationally that the occasional nighttime visit from my children is unavoidable and anyway not going to do me any permanent damage. I feel awful about this, because I'm not nearly nice enough to my poor four year old when he does wake me up - once I'm fully awake, I can think clearly enough to disguise my anger and frustration, but in those first few blurry moments I must seem to him a mommy monster, and that breaks my heart. In my regular life as a mother, I try so hard not to make him feel guilty or bad about himself - he's very sensitive and easily upset - but I undo all my good intentions with a few angry words at 2am.

Worst of all are nights like this one - the four year old couldn't sleep and woke everyone else up (well, everyone except my husband, who for the sake of this blog entry you should just assume is on another planet and therefore unavailable from bedtime until his alarm goes off in the morning). I was unforgivably nasty to the poor little thing and sent him back to bed feeling worse, I'm sure, than he had when he got up. By then, of course, the baby was wide awake - my same sweet baby who didn't need sleep as an infant needs it less as a toddler, and if he's awakened at all he's pretty much done for the night. So here I am, approaching 3am, trying to outlast someone who can sleep whenever he chooses. To be so jealous of a baby.

My idea of a perfect vacation is a dark hotel room with a deep soft bed, and silence. I used to dream of seeing the world, learning new things, now I dream, when I can, of sleep. That's actually true - often when I am asleep, I dream that I am tired and am not allowed rest. A therapist would have a heydey with me.

Sorry for the self-pitying ramble. The baby is cuddling up to me now (thank goodness he's so cute), so I'm going to go try to salvage the last few hours of night.

Burst my bubble, weird child

I'm obsessing over some online review sites. Write 50 reviews and get an iPod shuffle! Or, you know, get a job and work like 3 hours and earn enough to BUY one - why does earning it this way seem so much better? I guess it's like I told my husband - I can ignore my kids for free, whereas I would have to pay a sitter if I were to go out and earn the money.

Oh, but my point. Heaven forbid I have a one-paragraph blog entry. I'm going cross-eyed doing these goofy reviews and took a break to google my blog name. Look who else was clever enough to come up with "look into my head." I feel so bright now.

From the perspective of time...

...my last job still sucked. In fact, the further from it I get, the more bitter I seem to become. I think that while I was embroiled in the poisonous corporate culture and the unmeetable demands and the sexism reflected largely (but certainly not exclusively) in salary parity, I became sort of numb to all of it. I tried to just keep my head down and survive, but I'm beginning to believe now that survival is not all one should expect from a job. I feel a bit like a battered woman who gets so used to being treated badly that she neither expects nor feels that she deserves better.

That may sound extreme, but I'm really not exagerrating. I feel like I've escaped, not just quit. I just read this article and related to it so completely that I only wish I'd read it sooner, before I'd sacrificed my 20s and my children's infancies to that awful place.

I stay home with my boys now. A couple months ago, I had a really rough mom day. My four year old had just developed an intolerance for lactose that was not yet diagnosed, and he missed the toilet in spectacular style. Immediately after I finished that cleanup, I discovered that a roast had leaked blood all over the refrigerator. As I scrubbed on my knees, muttering about potty training and e. coli, a former coworker called. He wanted to tell me about some awful things my old boss was saying about me. I started to get upset (some kind of Pavlovian reflex that still strikes if I think of my former company for too long), but then remembered that it's not my problem any more. I told my friend, "you can tell [boss] that I would literally rather scoop shit off the floor with my bare hands than work for him again." It was cathartic and the literal truth. My worst mom day was happier than my best day there. I love my new life.

With all due respect to our exploring forefathers...

Why in the name of all that's holy would an explorer land HERE, in what is now Maryland, and think "hey, this would be a great place to settle"??? I like the daring and excitement of the explorer legends, but it's hard to understand why anyone would see this as appealing. If I were an explorer, I would set foot on Maryland soil today and take the following inventory:

Mosquitoes? check
Swamps? check
Blistering heat? check
Sweltering humidity? check

If this list did not deter me, I could stick around a few months and add "extreme cold and ice and snow" to my list of features.

Of course, one could argue that the early explorers didn't have quite the basis for comparison that we are blessed with today, and that they had just been on rickety boats with inadequate food and water for ages, so the real question may be why I am still living here myself. I blame my family. In the meantime, I am going to obey the weather service's advice to "stay in an air-conditioned room."

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman started the year I was born, and I remember worshiping Lynda Carter from a very early age. My husband has already exploited pictures of me in Wonder Woman underoos on his own blog, and I recently came across a fan letter I wrote to Lynda Carter when I was five. I taped a quarter to the letter - I guess I thought celebrities were a charity. My mother saved it instead of sending it. I was mad when I found out, but now I'm glad to have concrete evidence of one of my early obsessions.

When the Wonder Woman series was recently released on DVD, my mother sent me the set. My television tastes have matured a little since I was first crazy about the show, so it sat on a shelf for a while. My husband opened it up a month ago when he could not face another minute of watching the Incredible Hulk (also released on DVD, and why do they keep making new kids' shows when my kids at least are completely satisfied with the old ones?). It was an instant hit with the under-10 crowd, so I've been immersed in the show a lot lately.

Although I'm sure Lynda Carter is aging beautifully, I'm afraid the same can not be said for the show. It's terrible for all the obvious reasons, but today I found the acid test for awful dialogue delivery - I accidentally hit the button on the DVD that makes the movie play at 1.5 speed, and neither my son nor I even noticed for over 30 minutes. My son noted that the music was playing fast, so I looked up and could tell that the actors' motions were slightly jerkier and even less natural than usual, but I never would have known from just listening to their voices. No wonder the show was an hour long, each line took 3 minutes to deliver.

I can't wait until the kids move on to their next fixation. What will it be? The A-Team? MacGyver?

Sarah's disgusting Home Depot story

We had dinner with some good friends, one of whom told a story that immediately made me think "yay! a story I can actually blog about without alienating anyone!" And anyway, as an aside, what kind of friends do I have that I can't tell their funniest stories without risking exile? You know who you are, all of you.

So, my friend Sarah went to Home Depot today. At this point in the story, I was questioning her characterization of the story as "disgusting," because really, what could happen at Home Depot? Overmulching of the guaranteed-for-one-year plants (that I always kill anyway and never get around to returning for the refund)? Shows my lack of imagination, because here's the rest of the story - Sarah and her friend were walking through the store, browsing, and a woman speed walked by them fast enough for them to notice her but not record details about her. Immediately after the woman passed, so to speak, a "septic odor" wafted by, leading Sarah to speculate that they were near the bathroom or fertilizer. She and her friend moved on to another section and shopped for another 10 minutes. When she returned to the scene of the walk-by, Sarah stepped in something squishy. She looked down and realized that she had, as she described it, "stepped in human waste!" Sarah's revulsion really can not be described in words, but only fully appreciated in the context of her body language (shudders) and tone of voice (shrill). Apparently there was an entire trail of human feces through the store, some of it having already been tracked through by shopping carts.

I stand corrected - disgusting things can happen at Home Depot and I will never shop there without watching where I'm walking just a little more carefully.

Truly quick one

Running out to dinner with friends (back home! with friends!) but realized that Mark Twain post was unlucky #13. I'm largely reformed from my triskedecktiphobia, or however that's spelled, but why take chances when we're all about to go out in the car? So here's the countercurse, lucky 14. Snort, countercurse, too much Harry Potter for me.

Mark Twain

I'm finally home, luxuriating in the presence of another parent to herd my rowdy sons, and have many tales of woe from my trip. Before I can post about the horrible man who was mean to me yesterday and who, if there is truly karma, is suffering already from the first of many unfortunate and hopefully painful maladies that he richly deserves for being such a huge asshole, I have to comment more succinctly (yes! succinctly!) on Mark Twain's life.

Left to his own devices, my husband wallows in Ken Burns documentaries. I've tried to encourage him to seek help, but denial is the first phase of everything. Now he's becoming evangelical and not just watching but taping and forcing others (namely, me) to watch these things. I've been home 12 hours and am now sitting imprisoned by jet-lag in front of a Mark Twain documentary. I am discovering that semi-conscious is actually the ideal state of mind in which to watch such a program (which in turn makes me question my husband's usual state of mind). I hate to admit that I'm sort of enjoying it, because he reads this blog, but there it is.

The comment I wanted to make, which was to be short and to the point (when will I ever learn brevity?), was that Mark Twain's life was as exciting as his writing. Understandable now the wide scope of his imagination and the diversity of his characters - and, as I must observe in my chronic self-absorption, the lack of imagination in my own attempts at writing. As soon as I wake up properly (maybe by Thursday), I will research opportunities for living more dangerously, a la steamboat captaining and 5 month ship journeys to Jerusalem. Ha, even as I write that, I have a feeling that waking up properly will return me to my homebody sense, and that I will have to resign myself to writing indefinitely about nothing more stimulating that middle class mothers of small children.

Stereotypical blogger introspection

I'm still new at the blog thing and trying not to beat myself up too much, but I'm surprised by how hard it is to find things to say. Anyone who knows me in real life can tell you that I'm not often at a loss for words - but somehow in this forum, awareness of an audience threatens to silence me. Especially goofy because I started the blog largely so that sense of audience (however imaginary) would motivate me to actually write instead of just thinking about writing as I have forever.

Actually, I discovered today that the forever above isn't accurate. Digging through my mother's hoarded stash of my childhood memories, I discovered journal after journal filled with stories I wrote in grade school, middle school, high school. So I guess I used to write - not especially well, if the sample I read today is any indication, but prolifically to be certain, and unselfconsciously, which is more than I can say for myself now.

I browsed through blogs tonight just to see what's out there and found many entries by people who had started blogging because they felt they had something to share but were then sort of stymied, either by the medium or the realization that maybe they didn't have all that much to begin with. That is probably my fear, that I feel I'm bursting with something to say but can't find it - maybe it's not there at all.

The other surprising thing (to me) about this blogging world is that I'm so unfunny. Many things strike me as funny on a given day (often hysterically, peeing-my-pants funny - today I laughed so loudly at something I don't even remember that I startled my 2 year old and he started crying, poor bug), but I'm coming to realize that I have a terrible memory and a mean sense of humor. As in, I can't actually write down most of the things I find funny in this forum, because I've told too many people I know to come read here, and I don't want anyone to recognize him or herself and be offended. I've actually gotten explicit license from one friend to use her as the butt of jokes on here, if only because I'm currently boring her to death, but since she gave me permission she hasn't done anything hysterical. At least not in my presense. At least not that I remember. That's another problem - my friends do a lot of funny stuff while I'm drinking, which only exacerbates the remembering problem.

Must stop blogging past my bedtime. I'll try to dream up something more interesting and come back tomorrow. Oh! Tomorrow should be entertaining - my mother's two sisters are coming to visit, and she hasn't spoken with one of them in something like 10 years. Our family is kind of like that with the silent treatment. It surprises me (and even more so, my husband), that no one is giving me the cold shoulder yet. My theory is that it's because I'm the only one with kids so far, so I'm temporarily valuable. Once my sister has kids, I'll be expendable and factions can begin forming against me.

Congenital insanity

I've spent most of today going through box after box (after box) of mostly papers and pictures that my mother kept to document my every breath from birth to high school graduation. Thank god I didn't live at home for long after graduation, or we might all have been buried alive under the detritus.

Just as I thought the end was approaching, I opened the last box and found...my great-aunt's old stamp collection. Thousands and thousands (no exagerration) of stamps, mostly stuffed in old prescription boxes with no obvious organizational structure and no indication of value. My first inclination, after hours of sorting through my own historical record, was to toss it all. Curiosity got the better of me and I started picking stamps at random and looking them up on ebay - almost every one I picked was selling for between $2 and $6. So now I feel like I can't just throw them away, because that would be like throwing out cash. Except that I don't know anything about stamps or how to get them appraised or sold or whatever and now I have a stamp headache and am just deeply concerned about the very obvious craziness I've been wading through all day, because it seems likely that it's congenital or at least contagious.

Stop me before I go camping

So, I proved myself wrong about the outdoorsy stuff yesterday. Weather was perfect, children were good, boat ride was wonderful. Sadly, there was no time for fishing (yes!). I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not the outdoors in general that I hate so much but the extreme heat and bug populations endemic to my current home of Baltimore. Odd, though, to find out at this late date that something I've held to be self-evident about myself (that I loathe being outside) may be untrue, at least in some cases. I pushed my limits still further by going outside two days in a row - took the kids to the beach today and, gasp, had fun again. Possible explanations:

1) I really do hate being outside except: when the temperature is between 69 and 73, there are no bugs or clouds, there are no pretty people in skimpy clothing nearby. These past two days have been a fluke in that all of these conditions have been met.
2) I have been on this vacation for so long that I would no longer recognize my normal avenues of recreation if I ran into them on the street and have therefore of necessity started developing alternatives.
3) I have had so much to drink on this vacation that I've not only killed huge numbers of brain cells but have actually altered my fundamental personality (that is going to be hard to explain when I get home).

I do see on weather.com that it is 95 and humid in Baltimore, so I have a feeling I'll be driven back indoors shortly after returning home, which is good, because I'm afraid if I stay here much longer I'll go camping and then hell will freeze over and hurt those poor flying pigs.

Take that, Google!

My ads are now where they belong. Whoop! My husband is such an enabler - he actually likes computer stuff and doesn't just fake it like me, so I've been using him as my computing crutch for years.

In other news, I have to go on a boat today, with two small children. I hear fishing may be involved. For anyone reading this that doesn't already know me, this is really really not my thing. Not sure what, specifically, "my thing" is, but it would have to involve at least 2 of the following elements - an urban area, being indoors, spending money, food (anything BUT fish), pampering, and friends. Well, I guess this actually sort of qualifies, as friends and food will be there, but I think maybe the "being indoors" qualification is an essential one. Really like being indoors as opposed to acting as if we evolved to the point of building elaborate shelters just to flee them for recreation.

My love/hate relationship with AdSense

My step-daughter invented the word "annore" a few months ago and it is permanently a part of my lexicon (correct usage - "Justin is annorin' me!"), to the point that I've actually used it to strangers a few times without thinking and then had to stammer my way through an explanation that probably didn't improve their opinion of my intelligence or eloquence.

One of the things that's annoring me right this minute is Google's AdSense. Until tonight, I've been all for it. I think it's really cool for two reasons - one, you can put it on your website and theoretically make money (though I have a sinking suspicion that my husband is the only one reading this site) and two, depending on your content, you can get some really hilarious ads.

For example - five of my best friends and I have a daily email thread because we live all over creation and never actually see each other. We all have small children, so our emails frequently include graphic descriptions of bodily functions. A couple of us use Google's gmail for mail (love gmail, btw), and we get the most hilarious ad links during some of our discussions courtesy of AdSense.

Anyway, that was then. Now, AdSense is pissing me off. I'm trying to add it to this blog, but the only place I can get it to show up is at the very bottom. Who is likely to read through even one of these crazy long posts, much less the whole blog? Even more annoring is the certain knowledge that the solution to my problem is laid out helpfully and accessibly on the AdSense help site, and that my own stubbornness is all that stands between me and the thrill of writing about farting just to see what comes up for ads. I don't like to ask for help, even when I know I have no idea what I'm doing. When it comes to computers, I am as averse to asking for directions as that overused stereotypical man on a road trip.

Besides, the AdSense site is kind of dense and unfun, and I'm a surface learner. I like to glean just enough about a subject to appear informed. I think this tendency is the result of a combination of congenital laziness and an 8-year career at an institution that systematically destroys any inherent love of learning (along with joy, happiness, and self-esteem) it finds in its employees. Oh, the years of pent-up hostility that are threatening to make this post even longer. I'll try to hold back for now.

I guess I'll dive into the help files tomorrow, as I unforgivably suck at html (after 8 years in IT, many of them spent faking at least peripheral knowledge of web development). In the meantime, scroll down to see if there are any fart-related ads - they're hilarious.

Shriners are wacky

I took the boys to a Shriners circus today with my mom and my friend Tivoli (thank goodness I had reinforcements, even with a 3-2 adult/child ratio, Owen managed to douse several strangers with melted snowcone). I remember loving the circus when i was little, but the last time I went to see Ringling Bros as an adult, it seemed sort of removed, like watching it on TV. Could have been the cheap seats, but it also seemed like sensory overload. I know that's sort of the point, but I have enough trouble focusing on one thing at a time.

So, the Shriners circus. First of all, what is up with the hats? No kidding, they kind of freak me out. I have a friend who is freaked out by carnies, but I think that Shriners are scarier, because they seem more organized. Like the hats might just be the outward manifestation of a much deeper and more ominous underground purpose. Fortunately, the Shriners themselves played a sort of background role today, allowing me to enjoy the circus itself.

Highlights were the elephant ride with my 4-year-old (can NOT believe he actually went through with it), the two muscle-y guys who did some kind of aerial Pilates from thick ribbons hung from a high wire, and the motorcyle CAGE OF DEATH (Tivoli especially liked the cage of death and wants one for her own, though she admits to having no practical use for it). Less impressive were the wheel-o-peacocks (who comes up with these things? 6 peacocks on perches on a mini-Ferris wheel? Seems like an ornithological outrage), the announcer/emcee guy, and the guy who stood on top of what looked like 6" cardboard tubes - anything I think I could do at home doesn't qualify for circus entertainment.

Overall, it was a ton of fun, and the kids had a great time, and we stopped at Dairy Queen on the way back - DQ always puts me in a good mood, but even more so when I've been out of the reach of modern amenities like fast food for several weeks. The drive back was just about as fun as the circus, because Tivoli told Justin a convoluted version of the 3 little pigs in which the pigs are named Clyde, Fred, and George and the wolf is Levi, and because Justin watered a rock in a really artistic fashion when we stopped to let him pee on the side of the road not 10 minutes after he used the bathroom at DQ. Good times.

Games my children teach me

My children teach me so much more than I teach them (of course, this may be due to my vastly superior ability and willingness to pay attention to anything for longer than 2 seconds, and/or the fact that my brain is larger than a walnut). They make up games and songs and stories and I marvel at their creativity. Most of the time.

The current game they are teaching me I'm not so crazy about - I like to call it musical beds. They seem to be engaged in a contest to see how many times they can change beds between sunset and sunrise. This is extra challenging here in the far north, as summer days are long and dark is only about seven hours long. I can say this with authority, having seen nearly every sunrise AND every sunset here during the past two weeks.

Last night, the boys teamed up for their musical beds entry, and as de facto judge I have to admire the effort:

10:30 - Both boys asleep in my bed (regular bed time is 8, preferably in their own beds, but any sleep must be deemed a success)
12:00 - I'm asleep in Justin's bed
2:45 - I wake up to find Justin in bed with me - he's getting stealthier, extra points for climbing over me without waking me up
4:00 - I hear fat feet thumping down the hallway. Owen is on the loose. I catch him halfway to the living room, apparently ready to start his day. Little monkey. I go to bed with him in my room.
5:45 - Justin comes into my room, now all three of us are in bed.

Summary - Owen didn't change beds but did get up, Justin and I both changed beds (Justin did twice). Definitely an A effort all around.

Man, I'm tired.

Giving in to the mommy urge

I'm not doing a very good job of keeping up with this blog - I'm afraid it will go the way of the 4000 journals I've kept since I was little, with five or six clustered entries followed by pages and pages of nothing. Part of the problem this time is that I'm currently on a very slow-paced vacation with two small children, so there's not much to write about other than their little exploits. I sort of wanted to avoid this being another mommy blog - there are so many, and so many I really like, that I don't want to be too redundant.

Of course, all that is just leading up to saying that I'm already going to give in and write about the kids after all. I can't help it, they're pretty much the funniest people alive. And the only ones here for me to write about (except my mother - but she can read and knows about this blog, so she's a dangerous potential subject).

Justin is four and says the funniest things on a regular basis, but my memory is a faulty vessel and I'm afraid I forget most of them before I can even tell anyone. One from this morning - he climbed up on top of the TV cabinet and saw the dust on the TV. His eyes got huge and he shouted to his little brother, "OWEN! Magic dust!" I think he thought Tinkerbell had been here. Oh, and from first thing today - he woke up and said "can I have some cheerios with the sweet sweet taste?" I asked if he wanted to look into commercial work.

Owen is at least as funny but has so far decided not to speak, so his humor is harder to describe. I'm not complaining about the muteness, by the way - Justin talks enough for both of them, and a couple extras. It's amazing, though, how a little monkey child with no speech can have so much personality. Most of it devilish. He understands pretty much everything (as evidenced by his immediate and violent response when Justin taunts him), and reacts with appropriate but hilarious body language and facial reactions.

I would try to concentrate further (much good it would do me) and come up with better and more detailed examples of how cute my kids are, but unfortunately they have transformed into little beasts while I was typing this, so I'm no longer in the right frame of mind. Perhaps a post about their more negative qualities would be easier to write, but I'm afraid it would be too long to read.

Nothing to whine about today

I hardly know what to say if I have nothing to complain about. The children were good (sort of), the weather wasn't ghastly (most of the day), and I seem to be settling into the doing-nothing routine (perhaps a little too comfortably). We went out for lunch and had leftovers for dinner, so I didn't even have to face food preparation, and the baby's aversion to local water seems to be subsiding, so the diapers were in the single digits.

Yep, that's it - guess I should try camping or some other self-inflicted misery so I have more to say.

Drinking is funnier in a small town

I went out (out! for the first time in several days!) with my friend Tivoli on Saturday. We went out where she lives, in Port Angeles, as my hometown has only one bar and we've already used it up. Port Angeles offered novelty and variety, not to mention convenience - Tiv's house is within easy walking distance of at least 2 places that serve beer. Easy walking distance includes a nearly vertical staircase from "downtown" to Tiv's residential neighborhood. The staircase seemed much easier on the way down, but we were sober then. And gravity works better for you on the way down.

Because I miss my husband and because everything is funnier when reflected in his amused reactions, I took notes while at the bars. They are hard to decipher (especially the ones at the end), and they include drawings that are impossible to describe and, due to technology constraints, impossible to scan, but they amuse me, so here they are. Commas also amuse me, as evidenced by that hideous runon sentence. Can you tell I've recovered from Saturday night's drinking and have started again? My liver weeps at this trip.

Please note, these notes are an exact translation of my drunken scrawl from Saturday, so any sense they do not make is the fault of my state of mind then, not now:

1st bar:
[Name] Crazy Fish
Says Aloha out front
stuffed sharks (2!) on ceiling w/tiffany lamp
crack ho used to work there [this note based on insider information from Tiv]
bad boob job in tube top

2nd bar:
man w/spiderman shirt
pole on dance fllor
knocked-in bathroom in middle of bar
eminem wannabe
maternity shirt [this later proved to be an actual pregnant person, complete with beer and cigarettes]
electric slide-like hip hop dance w/old owner (3 people), people hooting
velcro shoes
black light everywhere
stage w/velvet rope
clear heels w/lights
shot from fat girl's boobs (by girl) [this is accompanied by original, if untalented, artist's rendering of said act]
weird guy humping girl lying on floor (same fat girl from above)
then girl humps her face
lots of hoodies

Off the Edge of the Earth

I recently stopped working to spend time with my little boys. Drunk with my newfound freedom from 2-week-a-year-vacation time (and possibly/probably just plain drunk as well), I booked a one-month trip to my home town of Forks, Washington. My husband and stepchildren came for the first week, and we packed in a ton of activities, culminating in the all day unmatched community frenzy that is the Forks Old-Fashioned Fourth of July. Then they left, and now I'm here with two small boys in a teeny logging town that could be the poster child for the middle of nowhere. Did I mention that the town is in a rain forest? Yeah, rains pretty much every day. My children are 4 and almost 2 and require huge amounts of physical activity to remain somewhat civilized. After a week of being housebound without their father or siblings, it's a tossup which of the three of us is going to make it out of this vacation alive. So far, I'd put my money on the baby - he seems to be standing back and letting my older son and me fight it out while he conserves his resources. Also, he's cagey in general - doesn't talk yet but you can actually see him plotting. If you've seen The Incredibles, and you've watched "Jack-Jack Attack" in the bonus materials, you've met my younger son.

This entry was meant to be about Forks, though, not my wretched children (I love them, but they are seriously inhuman this week). My husband grew up in southern Delaware, about 15 minutes from a big resort town. When we met and I told him that I grew up rural, he said he could relate because he was from a small town too. I laughed at him then (and still do at the memory, although right now the laugh has a slightly bitter, manic tinge to it) and said that living 15 minutes from a resort town has nothing on my hometown. I could tell he didn't really understand the difference until the first time he visited my mother with me. We landed in Seattle and rented a car, then started to drive. We drove about 45 minutes and hopped on a ferry - so far, so good. Took the ferry across the sound, another 30 minutes. Left the ferry, drove a few miles, and fell off the map. After Kingston, there's so much nothing it hurts your eyes to look at it. I saw something like fear in my husband's eyes as the miles and hours passed with no discernible landmarks or human habitation. In all, it takes about 4 hours to get from Seattle to Forks, on the most deserted 2 lane highway you can imagine with nothing but forest on both sides most of the way. The nearest town (also the nearest movie theater, orthodontist, fast food, etc) is 60 miles away and even it only has 17,000 residents. By the time we left, I think Keith felt like he'd grown up in a metropolis.

Forks has 2500 residents and one stoplight. I went to high school here and it still shocks my system when I visit, to realize how small town life can be so isolated and feel so crowded at the same time. There's nowhere to go and nothing much to do, especially in bad weather (most of the time, in other words), but I can't walk down the street without running into 5 people I knew in what feels like a past life. Really nice people, I'm not complaining, it's just surreal after living in one city after another for the past 13 years (I moved straight from Forks to Los Angeles, then Seattle, and now live in Baltimore - I think I decided small town life wasn't for me sometime within the first week after moving here in 8th grade).

Living in a small town is a little like being a movie star - you have to assume you will be recognized the minute you leave the house. This results in a couple identifiable types of townspeople. One group, largely made up of girls and women in their teens and 20s, prepare meticulously for every public outing, even if the outing itself is no more exciting than going to the store for milk. These women don't leave the house without full makeup (foundation, lots of mascara, dark lipstick) and hair punished strand by strand into their individual visions of perfection. You have to admire the effort, but it looks tiring to me. Another group, and I'm afraid my family falls more into this category, avoids going out unnecessarily at all to avoid excessive familiarity. The third group either never cared or has since given up their concern and just heads out on the town however they rolled out of bed (or out of work, which is largely outdoors here and fairly messy). This results in an interesting aesthetic at the grocery store, if you're into people-watching.

I don't mean to sound mocking or derisive - well, at least not entirely. There are good things about small towns, and this one in particular. Good things that motivated me to bring my boys here for the summer to see a different, slower, safer way of life. I can let them play in the yard without worrying they'll be taken. I can walk them to town for ice cream and not cringe when someone honks as they drive by. My heart doesn't stop in my chest if a stranger approaches my child on the playground. And the scenery alone is worth seeing if you haven't. Forks is within sight of the Olympic mountains and only 5 miles from some really gorgeous wild beaches that make the warmer eastern beaches seem dull and tame by comparison. The highway that seems to stretch on interminably if you're just trying to get from A to B is lined with trees so high they make you feel small and insignificant, trees that make you think about what the world was like before we started messing with it. Even the logged areas that look like little boys' crewcuts just reveal more of the mystery of the forest beyond. The trees at the edges of clearcuts have jutting-out branches like giants' ladders up the sides, from not having had sun reach that far beneath the canopy for years. Deer and elk and even black bears are common sights. Someone as citified and squeamish as I am can catch fish without having the first idea what they're doing, as I proved yesterday.

Well, this is only my second blog entry and I guess I've proven that whatever else I am, I am not succinct. Nor am I good at the logical windup and ending. I'll head to bed to stop myself writing more now, but I have a feeling I'll have a lot more time for writing during the final 12 days of my trip.

First entry - how intimidating

I feel like such a copycat, starting a blog after my husband's has gotten so good (http://kalioto.blogspot.com), but I've spent a lot of time alone this week and have realized a few things about myself. I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, and have at last count been waiting 29 years, 3 months, and 26 days for some genius plot idea to strike me from the blue. During that time, however, my focus, creativity, and memory (important for actually writing down ideas that occur in inconvenient places) have gone from questionable to often missing altogether. I have ideas, lots of them, but they're ephemeral and disconnected and small - no great American novel ideas, more like one liners that only the other voices in my head get to hear. My husband and I call these "car thoughts" - as in, I have most of my thoughts while driving, which is the only time in an average day that I have time or mental space for thoughts beyond diaper changes and grocery lists. I don't know if anyone really needs/wants to share in this so-far-mental monologue of mine, but the theory here is that if I actually write down some of my one-liner thoughts, I may at some point work up to entire paragraphs, essays, short stories, etc. I can dream, right? In other words, this is about me, not you, whoever you are. Nothing like a selfless blog.

Hmm, for someone who is writing to expand her thoughts, I sure am longwinded. Surely that introduction could have been more succinct. I'll try out this posting thing and come back in a bit for a download (from my swiss cheese brain) of my most recent car thought musings.