Words can't express the depths of my loathing

I am 10 days away from my physics final, after which I will never have to take another physics class, ever. You'd think that having the end in sight would alleviate some of my chronic hatred for this class/professor/subject, but sadly such is not the case. I have never worked so hard for so little - no sense of satisfaction, no idea what my grade is (because this teacher, among his many other crimes against education, lost all of our homework grades, hasn't graded any labs, and added a few random quizzes that aren't represented in the grade formula in the syllabus). Hate hate hate. I have a test tomorrow, on chapters were were supposed to cover the last week of October but just completed last Tuesday, and which I still don't begin to understand. We will not be covering anything at all about optics, and while god knows I don't want to be responsible for even more information in this awful class, I need to know optics for the MCAT, so it would have been nice to at least see something about it.

I signed up for the MCAT last night - $225 for a sure-to-be miserable experience. It's like spending money on a root canal, or a new tire (oh, yeah, just did that too - stupid flat tire last week). I guess I'd better start putting together my study plan for that. As for now, I have to get back to studying for my craptastic test tomorrow, or there won't be much point in the MCAT.

Did you know I'm from Forks, Washington?

That ought to bring in the page-hits, too bad I don't have google ads. It's so beyond weird that my crappy small hopeless poor dying hometown is now world famous. For those of you who don't have preteens (or don't admit to reading preteen literature even though I know you totally do), the hit book series (and upcoming movie) Twilight takes place in Forks, Washington. For those of you who have never been there, and I'm guessing that's just about everyone in the whole world, statistically speaking, it's a really really REALLY small logging town in the middle of nowhere in Washington state, about 4 hours west of Seattle (no, Seattle is not on the ocean, I swear easterners never look at a map west of the Mississippi).

When I graduated from high school (oh, about 58 years ago), there were only about 2500 residents in town. Logging had pretty much dried up and even liquor had stopped being profitable, to the point that the last solvent bar literally burned to the ground a couple years ago (the rumor is that the owners burned it up for the insurance money, but I can't confirm). The town is about 5 miles from a Native American reservation, and although I spent my whole painfully long high school tenure in town, I couldn't tell you anything about the rez, because PC or not, the twain just ain't meetin'. Don't buy everything you read in novels written by a woman who's never been there.

Our sports teams had to be bused up to 12 hours (no exaggeration) for meets, our homecoming dances and proms were held in not just a gym but the old gym, there is no fast food or movie theater within 60 miles, and (this is coming from a 1st generation Forks resident) the gene pool isn't all that deep, if you know what I mean. My close friends and I spent nearly every day that I remember dreaming of the day we could leave town without looking back. There's really nothing to do in Forks, and that is also not an exaggeration.

So it's something of a surprise to hear that people are choosing Forks as a vacation hotspot based on the Twilight books. Don't get me wrong, I love the books, but most of the excitement in them is caused by the proximity to vampires, not the proximity to mind-numbingly dull nothingness and constant rain. I guess it's just sour grapes - I wish I'd bought real estate when it was still about $2.50/acre.

A weird holiday feeling

My emotions don't seem to know where to settle. I'm tired, after a long day, but it was good to keep busy while my nerves were fraying. I took my oldest boy with me to vote, and I hope he remembers this when he's older, the way our parents remember Kennedy (though hopefully with less death and horror). I start to get excited and hopeful, then dampen my enthusiasm with anxious watching, as if my own optimism could jinx the election. In short, I'm all over the damn place. I don't like that the first states to close polls are almost all too close to call - I want this to be decisive. I love that the voter turnout was huge. I want more sugar but I am already down to like 2 pairs of pants because of all the nervous eating I've been doing this week between school and the election.

PleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasewinOBAMA!

Ooo, champagne.

Toddler Talk

I'm supposed to be studying for a test in, oh crap, 2 hours, and I'm sure no one's even checking this sad excuse for a blog any more, but hi! The inmates currently in the asylum are being ever so amusing and distracting me from memorizing one more boring-ass fact about cellular respiration.

I love this stage of talking, where you can mostly understand their babbling but can choose not to at will, and where every somewhat intelligent sentence seems like a huge and surprising accomplishment, not so much different than if one of the dogs sat up and asked for his dinner in English. It's even more fun with twins, because they've started to supplement their just-us-two crazy twinspeak with real words, so we can follow along for the first time. The dialog tends to go something like this:

Thing 1: Heah go, Bean! (offering some partly chewed cracker or a toy she does not want)
Thing 2: Go a-WAY! (haughtily turning face away)
Thing 1: HEAH GO, BEAN! (now shoving offering in her face)
Thing 2: Fank oo. (resigned, accepting unwanted object and immediately chucking it)
Thing 1: Weccome.
Thing 2: Let's go, Sibee!!!!! (jumping up, inspired by alien baby forces, and launching into a full-out run around the house)
Both: TEEHEEHEEHEEHEE (until they collide, trip, or otherwise harm themselves or others)

So you can see why I can not, CAN NOT, focus for one more second on the stupid Krebs cycle or photosystems I and II or the phases of mitosis. I much prefer the multicellular activity right here at home.

Here I am!

I know, I know, it's been a really long time. The thing is, once more than a week or so has passed, I feel like whatever I post next has to be really good, either funny or meaningful or at least newsworthy, but of course I have nothing funny or meaningful or newsworthy to share, and so the time continues to pass unannotated and the pressure mounts until finally, I break it with just such a boring update post as this. And so on to the updates!

Kids - except for the cold that we've all been passing around for the past 2-3 weeks (we should have bought stock in Kleenex, that's got to be recession-proof), all the kids are doing well. Twins are chattering up a storm and thinking they're actual people. Big boys are both doing really well in school, better than I'd hoped. Biggest kids are, I think, also well, although I haven't seen much of them since school started.

School - if you'd asked me yesterday morning, I'd have said school was going well. Unfortunately, I got back my first physics test yesterday, so that appraisal is no longer exactly valid. Words just can't express how bad this teacher is, or the depths of my frustration at the very real possibility that his incompetence is going to keep me out of med school. It gives me a headache just thinking of it, so I'll move on.

Not much else to move on to, actually, my life mostly consists of kids and school. Speaking of which - the twins are trying to slam each other in a door and I have to get ready for school. And this is why I never finish a coherent sentence, much less a post.

Crazy neighbors

I (mostly) like my house, I even like my city, and the neighborhood is much better than it used to be, but my immediate neighbors are almost all completely fucking insane. Today I will focus on the next-door neighbors, who resemble George and Barbara Bush in relative ages if not in politics (I don't know their politics or care to). When I brought my now-5-year-old home from the hospital, the husband saw us in the yard with the baby and said "I don't like kids." They both work from home and must have their groceries delivered, because I don't think I've ever seen them leave.

They must get bored living Boo-Radley-style, because they seem to spend most of their time looking out their windows and into my yard. We have a pretty big yard, and so do they, and our yards are separated by a fence, so they really could just choose to ignore us. God knows I try to ignore them. They collect feral cats by leaving food out on their porch, then complain when my dogs go eat it (the city rats, apparently, are welcome to the buffet). They collected OUR cat one day, after he had gotten out of the house, and kept him for a month without our knowledge, having him neutered and his ear notched before my mother rescued him. Ever since, they have insisted on returning the cat to us every time he gets outside, even though he rarely leaves our yard - they actually come into our yard to get the cat and bring him back. All. The. Time.

I just got involved in a pointless political debate (is there any other kind) with a friend from school and now dinner is cold and I've had more beer than I meant to and I have no time/energy to wrap this up gracefully. So, as my son would say, the end.

Shameless Substitution of Pictures for Actual Posting

I'd like to say I haven't been posting because school is keeping me busy, but let's be honest - I'm always a slacker. So here, in lieu of really dull updates about my school, the kids' school, my recent alarming weight gain, my exhaustion, the increasingly shrill and incredulous voice in my head every time I see or think of either McCain or (especially) Palin, are two brief stories told in pictures.

Story 1 - Seven-year-old gets glasses (poor kid needs not only glasses but bifocals, but mercifully is too young to feel the dorkiness):

He wanted these:

But fortunately, the bifocal lenses didn't fit those frames, so he got these instead:

Isn't he cute?

Story 2 - A day at the zoo with the twins

Twins brushing a goat:

Pretending to be baby birds:

Girly in awe of swimming polar bear (it really was kind of awesome, was playing and swimming and by the way absolutely freaking enormous and also isn't this just a great pic? Can't believe I got a picture of her face and the bear, I suck at photography):

Boy twin was also fascinated - although the bear was off-camera at this point, can't you just feel the enthusiasm?

That is all, I'm sure I'll post again sometime in 2008.

Pinecone is my favorite Palin

Don't ask me why I feel compelled to watch any part of the RNC, it just pisses me off. WHO is buying this? Okay, I'm not going to go into all the things this fascist crazy-assed bitch is saying that are just wrong wrong wrong wrong, or how lily-fucking-white this crowd is, or how Palin was part of the party that wants Alaska to SECEDE FROM THE COUNTRY, I'm just going to focus on the cute Palin, the one I actually DO like. The youngest daughter, whose name I heard as "Pinecone," but who is actually named Piper, just licked her hand and then rubbed it on the head of her unfortunate political pawn of a disabled baby brother. I think my husband is blogging more details of the incident, so I'll just focus on how deliciously cute this little girl is. Apparently there is no evil without a silver lining.

Just a side note - I just realized that every single person who actually benefits from the Republican tax cuts is in that auditorium. Why can't people actually vote their self-interest? Why do they insist on "no new taxes," when the new taxes would only apply to really really really rich people (read: not you, rednecks).

Yet another side note - Republicans seem to have a really low threshold for humor. These people have clearly not laughed enough in their lives. I will admit that she's a pretty good speaker, but these jokes are just not that funny. You people make me sad.

All politics, all the time

I bet the 7 of you who read this blog are really looking forward to the election being over, if only so I'll stop talking about it. Too bad for you all, I have 2.5 months left!

So, how's about that scary bitch of a VP candidate??? I think it says a lot about this country that the GOP chose someone with no experience, who is a right-wing psycho fascist, JUST because she's a woman and may steal some of the Hilary vote. I think it says even more about this country that they may actually be right, that Obama could lose just because some Hilary supporters are still so pissed off that their girl didn't win that they'll actually vote against their beliefs or stay home altogether. I hope hope hope Obama wins, but if he doesn't, the democrats will have screwed themselves again, by letting that primary go on to the point where the party is so divided it may sink its own candidate. I'm so proud to be part of this fucking moronic organization. And yet it's the better of the two choices.

Just wait, more commentary to come during next week's Karl Rove convention. Anyone else see the irony of a hurricane hitting New Orleans on the anniversary of Katrina, just as the republicans gather to promote a walking fossil and his affirmative action VP pick?

Can I just say...

...where the fuck was this Al Gore 8 years ago??? If he'd spoken like this then, with this passion and articulation, maybe we wouldn't have the last 2 terms of crap to recover from. Stupid man. I mean, lovely speech, but why such a late bloomer, Al?

Why yes, we are still watching the convention here, thanks for asking.

If I were a religious person, I would be fearing for my family's souls

We are suffering through hour 6 of the Democratic National Convention, and we're all getting a little punchy. My mother has a 44 year history of watching the whole convention every 4 years, and this is the first one since she moved in with us, so it's a big week for all of us. She's actually Tivo-ing the whole thing, just in case we miss any of Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper's scintillating commentary. I'm really starting to understand why the Democrats keep losing. This couldn't be more soporific. I'm as enthusiastic about Obama as anyone, but I can't see this lineup of dullness, set to dull music, as inspiring anybody.

Oh, but my family's souls. We're watching the introductory video on Michelle Obama (who I really like but kind of fear), and her brother says, "we lost our father in 1991." Simultaneously, my husband says "we found him in 1995" and my mother says "and we've been looking for him ever since." I live with funny, but kind of wicked, people.

Shame

Shame is almost a pretty sounding word, like serendipity or quintessential, but it's an ugly feeling, and I don't think I really knew its meaning until this year. Shame, I now know (try to write that, while marginally drunk, at 2:45am, by the way, it really wants to come out 'I know now'), is having to answer questions like "have you recently turned to drugs or alcohol" and "what kinds of feelings are negative feelings" from a marriage counselor. Me? Turn to alcohol? And please, who doesn't think anger, sadness, and anxiety are negative feelings? But that gave the Steve Martin therapist with the child molester mustache much fodder for note-taking, at $2 a minute. Clearly, thinking some feelings are negative is a big red flag. And so, I have renamed our therapy as "wife failure class," and hereby resolve to do better, although I'm still a little unclear about what that entails, exactly. Probably, to be honest, not going out drinking and dancing until after 2am the night before the kids meet their teachers.

An excellent character trait in a spouse

Not to be too personal, but things have been a little roller-coastery around here, marriage-wise, and I'm happy to say they seem to be on an upswing. When discussing the possibility of marriage counseling, we talked about not wanting to disappoint each other. My lovely husband said - as the children ran dirty and grouchy through the filthy house, as he put away dishes from the meal he bought and prepared after working all day to support us, as I sat with my 3rd beer in an hour and surfed the internet with my fat roll hanging over the waistband of my too-tight shorts - that I never disappoint him. And so I have determined that the single most important character trait in a spouse, at least in my spouse, is low expectations. It certainly helps to be the second wife, compared always to a woman who seems to actively seek slovenliness, poor parenting, insanely bad money management, and unkindess. I'm just not ambitious enough to beat her.

Peace and Quiet

Next up in my list of weird things - peace and quiet. I'm visiting friends in Minneapolis, and have had a long lovely day, full of books and movies and way too much junk food. I feel like my brain has been full of buzzing and bitten off words and sharp pointy things for months now. Being here, away from children and schoolwork and chores and obligations, I can feel an almost tangible stilling of the hectic mess in my mind. I'm not sure yet if that's a good thing. It's a little scary to think that I may finally see what's been lurking under all the noise.

Things That Are Weird

This is the first in a series - okay, who am I kidding, I have nothing like the perserverence to write an actual series, but let's play make-believe, shall we? - about things I find weird. I find a lot of things weird. Life is strange. One of the strangest things about being an atheist is that I don't see reason in anything, no overall pattern to tie all the weirdness together, and so things that seem normal at first glance, just because you're used to them, seem really bizarre and unlikely upon further inspection.

So, my first weird thing - beer. Not that I don't like beer, as you all know, so you can see from the beginning that weird does not necessarily equal bad. It's just strange, how we pay money and seek out this sort of foul-tasting, off-smelling liquid (when soda is so much more socially acceptable and more slowly damaging, biologically), when all we do with it in the best case scenario is convert it almost immediately into urine and in the worst case into vomit and urine. And yet, when you have had a day like mine, when your 7 year old has tried your patience for the 9,000th time and your patience has failed, no contest, you need the beer or you will run away screaming, will seek out hard drugs, will enter a life of crime or whatever it takes to get. the. fuck. away, you damn near worship the beer for its temporary reprieve, its dulling of life's sharp edges, its postponement of real life and real problems. Like I said, beer is weird.

My face is blurry

My friend's daughter spent a lot of time with her eyes open underwater yesterday, and emerged from the pool with the pink eyes of an easter bunny. She rubbed them and said, "my face is blurry," which I thought was the best description ever of that used-up raw itchy feeling. I felt that way myself on Saturday night, after powering through the new Twilight book. I love immersing myself so completely in a book that I feel like I'm waking up from someone else's dream when it's over, when my eyes are grainy and red from being submerged so long in a fictional universe. A lot of my 32-year-long writer's block is fear of trying, and failing, to bring my own imagination so tangibly and accessibly to life. It's too bad I can't just read fiction for a living, I'm one hell of a reader.

August and Everything After

Isn't that a Counting Crows album? I love Counting Crows.

This summer has been long and strange, and I was looking forward to the turn of the calendar, but August 1st started off a bit rocky. On my way to a chemistry test for which I was grieviously underprepared, my car abruptly clonked out of commission in the middle of an intersection. Four strangers stopped, during rush hour, to offer assistance, and my friend came with his Volvo to push me out of harm's way, so the actual breakdown ended up being sort of uplifting, in an all-people-don't-suck sort of way. Unfortunately, the estimate on the repair is about half of the car's actual value, which does suck, no matter how I look for silver linings. I made it to class only a few minutes late, while the professor was still reviewing. The test itself was insanely hard, causing one girl to leave the classroom in hysterics and one unfortunate 20 year old boy to weep quietly at his desk. I am perverse and kind of enjoyed the challenge of it, although my classmates didn't appreciate my enthusiasm during the postmortem. I hate having to wait until Monday for the grade.

After all that, the day improved dramatically. I had a nap, one of my favorite food groups, and then took the little monsters to the pool and saw a lot of friends. Then I got to dress up like a fancy girl and go out for a fancy dinner with some old and some new friends, and it was great fun. Then, best of all, we went dancing, which always makes me happy, even though I'm not a good dancer and it was like dancing in a sauna and my legs were already sore from a way-too-ambitious workout on Monday.

The new Twilight book is out today, and my mother is at the store getting it right now. That's my whole plan for the day, which is just fanfuckingtastic. Well, that and a nap, of course.

A riddle, from the mind of my nutty nuthead

"I feel hungry for somefin. Somefin delicious. They have black covers and white fings. You know what shape they are? A circle. They're not Swedish Fish that you don't want me to have. I had two of dem. You know what I mean?"



Hint:

Love

I never have a camera when I really need one - this picture was taken with my phone, and it's fuzzy and incomplete. Tonight, my quirky 4 year old was a star. He is that critical one degree off from center, just enough different that people think he fits in but he doesn't, quite. Tonight, though, he was the main event, and I've never seen such joy. He decided to try jumping off the diving board, and as he dithered and fretted like any nervous 4 year old but more so, everyone at the pool gathered around and supported him. Instead of yelling at him to hurry up or get off the board, as I'm sure I would at their age, the other kids in line started chanting and clapping their encouragement. By the time I got on the board myself and tossed him in to put us all out of our...not misery, but anticipation, people were placing bets on what he would do. I later heard that a child we don't even know was being herded from the pool at this time and protested to his father, "please, wait, I want to see what happens." I grew up in a small town, and even so I've never seen such a thing, where one child's fear and excitement transports a community. I don't think it was just the ever-present alcohol that brought tears to my eyes. My children are so lucky, to have this love in their lives.

Love is the strangest thing. Everyone feels it, and who can define it? Of course I love the boy - I "grew him out of me," as he says - but what motivated all these friends and strangers to see past his obstreperousness to the momentous occasion it was for him? What, for that matter, makes all the lovely people in my life tolerate my recently near-constant drunkenness and frequent weepiness? It feels like sheer ingratitude to be anything other than radiant with joy in the face of such an unasked for, undeserved outpouring of kindness and acceptance.

I still often wish for the imagination and courage to write, and feel like something of a failure for falling back on medicine. If I had the courage, and the perseverance, I would begin my writing career with some kind of testimonial to friendship, some kind of homage to the friends who hold me up with their laughter and love. The ones who kiss me and say they love me, even when I let them down. The people who know everything about me and those one step removed who offer their support on faith alone. The kind strangers who love my children on my behalf, or me on theirs, and cheer on my strange son at a moment that could have been mundane but which these beautiful rare people rendered transcendent.

This is me, writing up my lab report

My summer class has improved somewhat, mostly because I ditch at the break most days, bring my laptop (to play spider solitaire) every day, and have made some...well, not friends really, but acquaintances at least, to amuse me. AND I got 104% on the first test, because I rawk at Chemistry. Except for writing up lab reports, which I do not want to do, since I just did one two days ago and my whole self is rebelling against the idea of doing another. Suck.

Randomness floating through my head as I cultivate ADHD as an alternative to schoolwork: Angelina Jolie just wants to be me - now she has 6 kids and her last two are boy/girl twins, just like me. Take away her money and her looks (and, to be fair, her energy - just that travel schedule would kill me) and we'd be twins ourselves. Facebook - it's finally growing on me, after having an account for ages and seldom checking it. Now I feel like a private detective, hunting down people from my past. Plus it's something else to do during class. Shoot, the nagging voice in the back of my head that says I'm going to be up all night writing this godforsaken report has shoved all the detritus aside. Guess I'll go back to staring blankly at my lab notebook.

Anyone have some paint I can watch dry? Or sniff?

I started my summer class today - I'm taking the second semester of general chemistry because it's a prerequisite for everything I have to take next year. The thrill of being back in school had already worn off a bit after one semester back, but now the thrill is gone baby gone. I have never in, let's see, 15.5 years of school ever ever been as bored as I was this morning. My professor is quite literally the dullest person I have ever encountered. He spent a solid hour reading the syllabus aloud, then another hour and a half reading slides slowly and repetitiously, then writing out on the overhead exactly what he had just read. And this was, so far, all review material. The class runs from 9-1 every. day. for 5 weeks, but I only made it until 11:30. I packed up my things and walked out while he was lecturing. I do realize how rude that is, but my only alternative was to start yelling and throwing things. I can not believe I have to go back in the morning, but at least this time I know to bring entertainment for myself. Like heroin.

In other news, my two oldest boys are at sleep-away football camp this week. The house is very quiet, and the 7-year-old is having quite the run of mood swings. He reportedly has a great time every minute of the camp until he lays eyes on me, and then he bursts into tears and collapses in a heap. I believe I'll restrict future visits to ones from a distance, using binoculars.

My nutty 4-year-old had a very frightening incident on the 4th, in which he vomited blood (boy do I never want any of the kids to ever do that again), but he bounced back more than completely and has been a reassuringly holy terror for the past couple days. Just now, my husband told the boy, as he tucked him in to bed, that our 9-year-old was going to give him his old Woody doll, from Toy Story. The boy's reply? "I don't want a soft Woody, it will just break and we will have to throw it away! I want a hard Woody!" How can you not love him.

You are what you eat

Last night, before the stomach flu my children have been passing around finally laid me low, I was imagining how model-thin I would be if I had never eaten a chip in my life. I think, actually, that I'd probably be dead of malnutrition, as chips have made up the bulk of my entire food intake (see graph for detail). Clearly, I have a problem, and there are no chips anonymous groups to help me.

Beer brings my voice back

I do understand, on an intellectual level, that drinking is not a viable alternative to a normal life, but it makes me feel so much better. Is that so wrong? This was a good day, the first good day in a while, really, and for no real reason. I'm so tired of thinking about myself and what I want, what's important, it's nice to take a break and revel in the fact that there were random Busch Lights hiding in the fridge, that my stomach is rising in that pre-nausea roller-coaster thrill way because I'm staring at the laptop screen, that I had a moment of prescience with my husband earlier that makes me feel hopeful about the future. That maybe I'm not an aberration, that I can be satisfied in life, that I'm not an unfit mother and wife. It's a rush, and beer just helps.

Silence

I've got a bad case of the mean reds today. I feel words drifting away from me, feel myself becoming still and quiet. I want to be a flower, to sit harmless and innocent under the sun and rain, but I am more like a weed, unloved and unlovable, drying up and blowing away.

My So-Called Life

I have a mental picture of myself, as I'm sure we all do. I think I know who I am, what's important to me, which way my internal compass is pointing. I think I'm a good person, that I think about others, that I know right from wrong and pretty reliably do the right thing. I'm starting to wonder, though, if my mental self-portrait is as inaccurate as the physical one - I'm always surprised when I look in a mirror and see my sagging post-baby body instead of the pretty young thing I somehow still feel like.

I moved to this city 11 years ago, and for ages it felt really foreign to me. Everything is different from what used to be home - the pace is different, the accent is different, the people are different, the climate is different. For several years, I lived with the assumption that I'd work myself back home eventually, but then I married a man with children who live here and the roots began to grow. After I had children of my own and stopped working full time, I began meeting wonderful people, mostly women, who were thoughtful and kind and funny and supportive and I gradually found myself enmeshed in a real community for the first time in my adult life. I can't describe the deep feeling of happiness it has given me to be a part of this group without sounding trite or hyperbolic.

Now I'm afraid that I have lost the love and trust of one of my closest friends in this tribe of mothers, someone who has been such a part of my life that my memories of my own children are tied up with her face. I have been talking to her in my head, trying to explain, trying to find the words to excuse myself, but everything ends up sounding like just that - excuses. I find myself engaged in an orgy of misplaced apology, begging forgiveness from cut-off strangers at intersections and bumped-into shoppers at grocery stores with an excess of fervor that must take them aback. I'm just full of remorse and regret. The good intentions I thought were a foundation aren't holding up to scrutiny - they turn out to be empty air and count for nothing.

Hey, Jealousy

Every once in a while, I toy with the idea of titling each post with a song title, but then I remember that I know nothing about music and never really have, so that would probably lead to even more protracted silences than usual. I do love the song Hey, Jealousy by the Gin Blossoms, though. It was popular during my brief foray into popular music during college, and it still reminds me of that time whenever I hear it.

Lately, I've found myself consumed with jealousy, and it really is a consuming and pointless emotion. Not relationship jealousy, but ugly middle-aged jealousy of youth. I see pretty teenagers in pretty summer dresses, thin and glowing, chattering like mindless birds, and I feel my eyes turn green. Of course I'd like to be thin, and not need makeup to remove the night-of-the-living-dead undereye circles, and wear mere suggestions of clothes without looking ridiculous, but what churns my stomach is the blank-slateness of their existence. I remember being that age myself and can't quite figure out the path that took me from there to here. I really missed the point of that whole Thoreau thing about living deliberately until it was far too late, and most of my choices had been made for me by chance or impulse or the path of least resistance. Is this the appeal of religion, the idea that you might get some celestial do-over? I want to be a different person, I want to have a different life, but the mirror is very clear on this subject - I'm calcified into who and what and where I am.

I'm so domestic

Every once in a blue moon, usually when the house has just crossed into the qualifying-for-federal-disaster-relief territory, I get a short-lived but strong impulse to act domesticated. This morning, I showered before my husband even left for work, then got all four of my monkeys dressed and out the door before 9am. To go grocery shopping, as I am a hero. They were so well-behaved that a kind woman commented at the checkout on their loveliness. I took big boy to the doctor to get an official asthma diagnosis, came home and made lunch, then put the twins down and cleaned for 1.5 hours straight. Which is probably 1.25 hours more than I've put in total in the past 2 months. It's still not CLEAN, exactly, but you can walk through every downstairs room and could actually eat at our dining room table. Oh, which reminds me, I also started dinner. AND, most miraculous of all, I'm in a calm peaceful happy mood (knock on wood) after all of that. If only being Barbara Billingsley was fun on a day-by-day basis and not just every once in a while.

I have a blog?

Oh, right. Hmm. Things have been a little off-kilter around here lately, nothing I can/should/will write much about, just the all-too-ordinary trials and tribulations of a boringly average wife and mother. I started my new job and it's very interesting, but my heart's not in it, or much of anything lately. The kids are done with school, the pool is open, my mother is away visiting my sister. My husband's ex is being the poster child for bad parenting and there's nothing I can do except watch with my chest hurting. My family is lovely, my friends are lovely, my life is just what I wanted. I'm sure this flatness will pass, and I'll be back here to dazzle you all with my wit and wisdom again.

I am officially lactose free, and other news

While talking to my husband last night, I realized that I've had quite a few personal milestones this past week. I knew I'd been busy, but it's nice to look back and see that all that busyness actually led to some accomplishments. In bullet form, because I'm too lazy to really write:

• I weaned the twins. This is huge. It went pretty smoothly, and they don't seem to miss it too much, other than a little extra whining in the morning, and I feel unchained. Yay to not being a dairy! I can't believe I made it almost two years.
• I ran 20 minutes, in a row. I don't think I've ever even come close to that, even when I was a kid. I am just amazed by the couch-to-5k-program - I just finished week 5 (of 9), and I've gone from almost stroking out during 1 minute intervals to not struggling that hard at 20 minutes. Who knew I had it in me? Now, if I just stopped eating constantly, maybe I'd see some results...
• I finished teaching, forever. This semester was a bit of a struggle, and it's a huge weight off to be done. Done done done!
• I finished my first semester back in school. I got an A in chemistry, and I have my fingers crossed that I'll have an A in physics, too, if my professor ever posts my grade. In the meantime, I'll just keep checking every half hour. Somehow, the dream of med school seems much more attainable now that I've finished the first step, however small.
• I got a summer job, just like a real college kid - I'm going to be doing research with my physics professor, poking fungi w/sharp sticks and looking at their individual atoms under a super-cool space age atomic force microscope. AND I'll get to publish about it. AND I get paid. It's awesome.

Best of all, I have this week almost entirely free of responsibility. I'm done with school and not yet starting work. The weather is a bit dreary, but who wants to be outside anyway? I'm wallowing in lazy mornings and late showers and trips to Target with my husband.

Nutty nuthead day

Today I found out that my little boy got into the free, full-day, excellent pre-kindergarten program at my big boy's school for this fall. I am so very excited. His birthday is only two weeks after the cutoff for kindergarten, and while I'm happy about him waiting the year because of his autism issues, I think this is the perfect interim step. Plus, free, can't beat that. And it means my mom won't have to run all over with the twins to get him to and from some half-day program while I'm at school full time. Anyway, this is probably not all that exciting to anyone but me, but I'm very relieved and happy.

And in honor of my silly child, a story from the grocery store today - we were walking down the cereal aisle, browsing, and he said "why is everything we can't have delicious?" Wise words from weird wee bits.

Wow, did I speak too soon

I firmly resolve to never admit in writing to being even momentarily pleased with my children. Two of them have spent this afternoon being the biggest assholes they can possibly be. I have left my cool so far behind, I barely remember feeling anything other than rage and despair about this whole motherhood thing.

I hardly ever comment on the trauma of step-parenting on this blog, but this time I simply must. I believe that putting a child on psychotropic medications for no other reason than that a parent can not or will not handle said child is nothing short of child abuse. Take a perfectly happy kid, put her on an SSRI because she doesn't listen (I've looked at the specs of the SSRI, by the way, and nowhere does it say that it makes children behave - on the contrary, the specs explicitly say this medication is not for use by children), and then be totally fucking amazed when that child becomes a jittery, orally-fixated basketcase. Her mother actually gave her a rubber thong to wear around her neck and chew on like a portable petri dish to try to stop her from eating her hair - obviously a better solution than not drugging the shit out of her as an alternative to actual parenting. There is nothing as consistently frustrating in my life as loving these children and seeing so clearly when they are being mistreated and being able to do exactly nothing about it.

Oh, and girly's cough is back with a vengeance, boy twin has a fever, and my husband and I are both starting to feel a little under the weather. I was thinking earlier, after girly threw up from the phlegm, that the best thing about having only one child must be the knowledge that the vector of illness doesn't have all that far to go - in our house, it can take literally weeks for an infection to burn its way all the way out - but listening to my children pick and fight and torture each other all. goddamned. afternoon makes me think that maybe there are other downsides to this large family thing, also. Happy fucking mother's day.

Mother's Day

Sometimes I feel like the most unsuitable unfit mother. I always love them perfectly, but rarely show it perfectly. I am far too selfish and impatient to be the mother my children deserve, the mother I wish I could be. Since I started back to school and the twins finally started sleeping, I've felt my lack even more acutely - am I hurting my kids by pursuing my own dreams? Am I taking too much time away from them for classes and homework and friends and my own life in general?

Thank goodness for Mother's Day. For this morning at least, I feel like I must be muddling through okay. To quote Sally Field - they like me, they really like me. All of my big ones have drawn me pictures and brought me treats of their own creation. My stepson drew a picture of our family in which I was labeled "Mom," which may be the best Mother's Day present ever. My four year old is singing "Happy Mother's Best Day to You," to the tune of "Happy Birthday." My girl twin is finally over the worst of her mystery fever, which may not be for me but makes her a much more pleasant member of the family. Everyone is being cheerful and kind to each other and only regularly destructive, and we're going Go-Karting in a while and life feels at least temporarily in balance.

I am so fortunate, and so are my children, that there are so many wonderful mothers in my life. My own mother has always been a model of patience and selflessness, and I try to live up to her example while my family and I benefit from her steadying presence every day. My grandmother was the kindest person I've ever known. I still miss her and I wish my children could have known her. My mother-friends save my life and sanity every day. When I had my first child, I didn't have many close friends who were mothers, and I felt so alone with my inadequacy and panic. Now, seven years later, I feel part of a network of incredible women, incredible mothers, and I don't know how I could go on without them.

Why is it so much harder to write what's real and important? I am not "only" a mother, there is more to my ever-shifting sense of self, but if I suck at this the rest seems pretty pointless. It's nice to have days like this, with or without the holiday label, that make me feel like I'm at least generally on the right track.

I may write my next post from prison...

...as I may be committing child abuse tomorrow. Surprisingly, not against one of my own children. This did start, as most of my parenting problems do, with my now-7-year old. He came home from school extra-surly today, and progressed through all of the negative emotions as the evening wore on until he peaked at near-hysteria just before bedtime. While I tucked him in, I finally got him to tell me why he was acting like he was possessed by evil spirits, and it turns out some little bastard in his class is bullying him. I got in over my head with the boy-raising fairly quickly and brought my husband into the conversation. Together, I hope/think we bolstered his weenie little spirits enough to survive another day.

Also, my girly has an inexplicable fever of 102. I am sooooo done having children, in case anyone was wondering.

Birthdays and Bodies and Bitchiness, oh my

I know, I know, I suck at blogging. I think about it, but I think I'm developing some sort of adult-onset ADD, compounded by a serious case of PMS. It's actually been a lovely few days, with gorgeous weather and happy children and fun with friends, but I have two tests in the morning and my children are being even more than usually obstreperous and my heart is actually beating funny in time with my general irritation. I did not miss this part of being a girl while I was pregnant all those times. It makes me mad every month. I'm done with babies! No more fertility for me, thanks.

So, in the interest of not being all-bitch, all-the-time, and to further delay the inevitable panicky last minute studying I've already postponed repeatedly (oh crap! hurray! I JUST as I was typing this sentence found my chem book. That's got to be a good omen), I have to comment on the BodyWorlds exhibit my friend and I went to at the Maryland Science Center today. It was so amazing, although I was surprised that it made me a little woozy at first. Nothing awful, not as bad as the first time I watched someone get his jaw wired at the hospital, but more than I expected. The bodies are all sliced up to reveal different aspects of their anatomy, and in many cases certain external features like eyebrows and earlobes and belly-buttons were reattached to the outside, which somehow made them seem both more and less life-like. There was also one whole section on fetal development, which was one of my favorites, although I did wonder how they managed to sneak all the dead fetuses past the right-to-lifers who won't even allow embryonic stem cell research.

It was so pretty out that we went paddle-boating in the harbor after the museum. I've always wanted to do that, but somehow I never get around to doing touristy things in my own city. I also got my very favorite peanut butter ice cream from Lee's, served by a nearly-comatose young man named Duane (he really seemed to be worse at consciousness than customer service, like just breathing in and out was taking most of his limited capacity for thought and action). See how I have absolutely no room for complaint? Stupid hormones, making me grumpy. It's even more frustrating to realize that my big girl's hormones are probably responsible for her insanity, too, and that we're just feeding off each other and into some awful stereotype. Thank goodness I'm hiding in my room, purportedly studying. Better get on that.

Stolen quiz, stupidly double-spaced (why can't I figure this out?)

TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer? I had to look - my husband just changed it to some weird Matrix-y city scene.

Q. How many televisions you have in your house? 1 in the living room, 1 in our room, 1 in mom's room. That's all that function, although we also have a warehouse of broken electronic crap that surely includes several obsolete televisions.

BIOLOGY
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed? right

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body? Just children and teeth.

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted? Um, groceries? I don't know, I'm not much with the heavy lifting. The twins, I guess.

Q. Have you ever been knocked out? Not yet!

BULLSHITOLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die? No, I'm neurotic enough.

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to? Kate? That's a tough one. I hate my name, I guess I should have alternatives planned. Laura? Um, Corrine? I'll have to think about it.

Q. What colour do you think looks best on you? blue, maybe

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item? yep

DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100? Sure

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000? Probably.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000? Sure, I hardly blog now!

Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000? Probably

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000? I don't think so

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000? If I got to pick the person. :)

DUMBOLOGY
Q: What is in your left pocket? nothing

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good film? I actually do like it. I like anything that I watched with my husband that put him into hysterics - his reflected amusement is hilarious

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house? hardwood

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower? stand. That's a weird question.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own? 1

LASTOLOGY
Q: Last person who texted you? Friend's husband, wanting to go to the gay bar with us

Q: Last person who called you? Heidi

Q: Person you hugged? Husband

FAVOURITOLOGY
Q: Number? 14

Q: Season? Spring because of flowers

Q: Colour? yellow

CURRENTOLOGY
Q: Missing someone? Yvette

Q: Mood? Lazy, happy

Q: Listening to? Backyardigans

Q: Watching? Also Backyardigans

Q: Worrying about? Sewage and dead mice in my basement. You'd worry too.

Q: Wearing? New tank top and capris. I always swore I'd never wear capris, but that was before cellulite made shorts inadvisable.

RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning? Running, can you believe it?

Q: What can you not wait to do? Finish the semester

Q: Do you smile often? all the time

Q: Are you a friendly person? usually

Mmm, sewage

You know what I don't like? My house. There are things about it that I do like, of course, but in general, it is a pain in my ass. There are holes in ceilings, broken windows, rampant weeds, hideous ancient paneling, weensy closets, and now the latest - some drain thing in the basement is full of, well, worse than crap apparently, and worse than crap is now backing up all over the basement floor. The good news is that the plumber was here really really fast. The bad news is that he is nowhere near free. Also, there is sewage IN MY HOUSE. That is definitely also bad news. Yuck.

I'm vomiting truth

That's a Tivoli quote from this evening. I'm too drunk to do justice to the evening, but too many funny things have happened not to post. First of all, the drive to the bar involved me, sadly sober, listening to no fewer than 5 backseat drivers yelling RIGHT! LEFT! even though I knew where I was going. And my mother went too. Yes, to the gay dance club. It's been a strange evening. I made Sarah cry and now Tivoli is in the fetal position and nachos are the only option. Surely this will make no sense in the morning, but such is 2:30am revelation. And now Sarah is life-coaching Tiv, and I'm trying to listen and transcribe while eating and drunk-spinning, and I love my friends and life seems good despite itself.

Happy birthday, baby

Happy birthday to my sweetheart. You're the best husband and father I can imagine and I'm lucky every day to be with you. I love you!

No twins were drowned in the writing of this post

My mother is back doing her clinical trial, and her 36-hour absence is palpable. My daughter is wearing the pjs she wore to bed Saturday night (it's Monday evening), a raincoat (her choice), and purple sparkly shoes (again, her choice). My four year old is in the same clothes he wore Saturday as well. Only because he continuously shits through his clothes is boy twin in clothes not old enough to walk by themselves. The laundry pile is starting to groan ominously. We're eating take out and leftovers whenever hunger occurs to someone, and there's no apple juice. The living room looks like Legoland in California meets Jackson Pollack, but with more dirt. My car has such unspeakably foul and ancient crusted takeout containers on the passenger side floor that I'm afraid to even tackle it.

Okay, I got the twins in the tub and relocated the laundry heap down a floor. I am sitting outside the bathroom, where my rotten daughter is deliberately and with malice aforethought throwing water onto the floor and yelling NO when I tell her to stop. Defiant pig. I have a classmate babysitting in the morning, and more classmates coming for a study group in the afternoon, so I have to put a veneer of clean on this pit of disorderliness. But first, I have to listen to the 6 year old read his homework, which always feels like doing penance for some unremembered but obviously very serious sin.

What a glorious day

I should give up the doctor idea and become a meteorologist. At least here in Baltimore, they get to wear hilariously ridiculous clothes and just make shit up for a living. Today, for example, was supposed to be rainy and wretched, and it is just beautiful. Not that I'm complaining. It just seems like a good gig, where no one cares that you're wrong all the time.

I spent most of my afternoon at the library at my college. Anyone who knows me well knows that libraries and I do not, as a rule, get along, but I needed a book on integrals (god help me) and the library is part of the college and not a larger library system, so I'm not yet banned from it. The library itself seemed to be on to me and my poor borrowing habits, though, and it took me a ludicrously long time to:

a) find the building itself
b) find the front door (really, how hard is that?)
c) goggle at the warehouse-sized room full of 4000 computers and about 17 books
d) use one of said 4000 computers to find a suitable-looking book
e) go up and down the elevator, hitting several floors more than once, in search of "Stacks," which is where the computer directed me but which is not, anywhere near an elevator, labeled
f) find a book that looked both useful and not hideously painful to read (like this post! ha!)
g) stand in a line longer than the one at Target this morning (who are these dorky undergrads, clogging the college library on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon?).
h) actually study, a little. Anyone have any questions about friction? No?

Wow, that was boring. Boring to live, boring to write, boring to read. But I'm committed to the blog entry now, despite my crazy 4 year old yelling "SIMON FOOTBALL" in the background on a permanent loop, so I'll keep plodding on.

Despite my battle with the library, it's been a good day - I got to go to Target (whee, I love Target) and get a curling iron, among other things (although I think I should have gotten a smaller one, now that I've played with this one), and the guys did yard work while I studied (it's really for the best that I not be around while the boy uses the riding mower, it makes my heart stop). I finished my friend's vampire book, which was hilarious, and I think we're going to the movies tonight, like real live popular culture consumers. My poor girly just fell and bit through her top lip, complete with way too much blood and no small degree of hyperventilation by me, but she seems okay and my own blood pressure should return to normal any time now. I can handle strangers' blood (and even my own, actually), but not my kids'.

Oh, and I had a caramel macchiato and cookie dough for dinner. Life is lovely.

Drunken ramble

Depending on who you talk to and your frame of mind, alcohol is supposed to either relax you or depress/enrage you. I think it takes a special kind of moodiness to have both reactions in one evening. I was trying to be tidy and clean up leftover beer from this weekend's birthday celebration for my husband (FORTY, can you believe it!), so I had a couple (3?) Coronas and was feeling jus' fahn, until the boy. Always the goddamned boy. Lost his fucking backpack. How do you lose a BACKPACK. He used it 25 minutes ago, it's large, the house isn't that big a mess. And it's not just the losing it, it's the atrocious magnified mosquito whine he emits when feeling guilty/angry/frustrated. Of course someone else took it, we all covet the backpack. It couldn't possibly be his complete inability to follow through with one goddamned task or find his ass with both hands and a map.

Whew, I feel better now. As I'm sure you all do. Now is bedtime, that most wonderful time of the day, and my mother is coming back tomorrow from her leisurely retreat being a lab rat for a clinical trial. I already appreciated her, honestly, but now I REALLY do. And now it is spring, almost in earnest, and the green grass always reminds me of when I was pregnant to bursting with this same wretched child, and the season seemed to move so much faster than my own arrested progress toward motherhood. Every time I left the house, I would gape childlike at the tree buds and burgeoning flora, much to my now-husband's amusement. Thinking back to that time and right after, when I held that bewildering new person in my arms, I resolve again to be more patient. I think it would help to lose my hearing.

E is for Easter. And Early. And Ear infection.

The plague continues apace and respects no holidays. The four year old is still wheezing, even after steroids, and is now complaining of ear pain. My husband is terribly congested and being quite stoic about it, which makes me feel both sympathetic and guilty, since I have NOT been all that stoic the past few days. I am feeling much better myself after the removal of the giant tumor-like nastiness from my tonsil, but we are all suffering from one degree or another of sleep deprivation. Last night, my husband had to go to work to fix something at 11:30. I went with him to keep him company, thinking it would be a quick trip. We got home at 3:30am. I fell asleep right at 4 and was awakened by excited Easter children at 4:22. In the course of trying to convince the children to go the fuck back to bed for a bare minimum of three hours, I rendered one shrill and shrieky with the injustice of not being allowed to sleep in my bed if he could. not. be. quiet. and the other began grabbing his ear and writhing in pain, requiring that I go downstairs, navigate the 30 pieces of poo the dogs left in the kitchen, and get him medicine and drink. I got back to sleep at 6:15 and we restarted the day as a family at the much more reasonable hour of 7:45. The big kids searched for Easter candy, the twins shook Easter eggs and ate candy off the floor like dogs, and I resembled the cryptkeeper with my sunken orbits. Happy Easter!

Want to see something really nasty?

I'm gaining new medical knowledge already, and I haven't even applied for med school yet! This beautiful picture is of a tonsil stone, also called a tonsillolith. Sadly, this is just an internet image and not a picture of the actual stone I removed from my tonsil today, but it gives you an idea of the nastiness (mine was much more impressive but shriveled a bit after extraction and is no longer all that photogenic). For those of you who, like me, had never heard of tonsilloliths, they are calcified ick (I believe that's the technical term) that grows in the "crypts" of your tonsil (no part of a body should be called a crypt, in my opinion, seems sort of morbid) and forms a pearl-like stone. Like an ice berg, mine was more subterranean than terranean and left a sizable hole in my tonsil after I extracted it with a QTip. I can't overstate the relief I feel now that it's not rubbing against the inside of my mouth and throat every time I swallow or breathe or eat. Don't say I never taught you anything!

The Easter Pig

We're not religious folk, but I like Easter. I like that it is a high holy Christian day but follows the most pagan and bizarre of calendars (how does the crucifixion have anything at all to do with the lunar cycle or the equinox)? Besides, what's not to like about unlimited candy, fancy dresses, and messy coloring of eggs? We've all been ill and it's starting to look a bit like The Shining around here, so today we dyed Easter eggs, in part to compensate for missing yet another outing due to wheezing and aching and general pestilence. Boy twin was mostly interested in picking up completed egg artworks and talking to them in his own sibilant crazy language, but girly got very involved in the dyeing process. I love this picture - besides showing her joy at the strange thing I was letting her do, her personality just shows through here:
























Of course, her personality is also pretty plain here, where her pouty little pissy face clearly objects to having had her picture taken the first time:

























Lastly, for your viewing picture, I present my piglet's imitation of an egg. I can only guess that this is based on the dragon egg in the critically acclaimed Backyardigans film Tale of the Mighty Knights, which quacks throughout the movie:

Spring Break

Wow, has it been almost 2 weeks? I sure do slack. Let's see, what's been doin'.

I had midterms in both classes last Wednesday (still no grades back, but I think I did well). Today, I gave the midterm in the hideous atrociousness that is the class I'm teaching - enough said about that. I have off from taking classes this week, off from teaching next week, and the kids are off next week too. A friend is in town for 2 months (or longer! she could stay longer!) and we have grand ambitions for projects while she's here. Today would be a good time to start on those ambitions, probably, but I don't see getting out from under this blanket on the couch any time soon. The 3 little kids are all varying degrees of ill, with the 4 year old in the lead with what he calls "group" but really seems to be regular but asthma-inducing virus. He hasn't wheezed in so long, I'd hoped he'd given it up. That boy, always has surprises up his sleeve.

In other news, I'm older now, and had a lovely birthday weekend with friends and the zoo and parties and cake. Lots and lots of cake. I am straining to put on pants that were loose not long ago. I am sadly having to contemplate cutting back to 1 or 2 desserts a day and maybe even exercising. How wretched.

This is dull, but life is pretty routine right now - a good routine, but nothing too noteworthy or exciting. Aren't you all glad I wrote?

He really IS an alien

I took the 4 year old with me to pick up the big boy from school today. Big boy read his reading homework on the drive home, while 4 year old quietly listened from the back. All of a sudden, and apropos of nothing at all (not what big boy was reading, not any previous discussion, not a TV show, nothing), the 4 year old yelled out in evident frustration:

"When am I ever going to get my tail????"

Opportunity Cost

All this high-falutin' book-learning is going to my head. Although I am studying physics and not economics, all the random never-used trivia I picked up somehow during my first try at college (how, I'm not sure, as I rarely went to class or read a textbook) is coming back to me at odd moments. Just now, for example, I was weighing (get it, weighing?) my desire for potato chips against my desire not to be fat to the point of resembling a marine mammal, and I realized that the opportunity cost of NOT eating the chips is just too high. I want the chips more than I want to fit through doorways, apparently. Surely self-knowledge is a good thing.

So little to say, so little time

My thoughts are fleeting at best, and mostly interrupted with fragments of physics equations that I can never quite follow to the answer. I often marvel at the fact that I managed a bachelor's degree at all the first time around, with the atrocious study skills and lazy ass class avoidance habits I had - I haven't missed a class this semester and I do my homework days in advance and STILL I find physics to be as close to incomprehensible as I'd imagine arabic or hungarian or russian to be.

My lovely husband tivo'd Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for me, and we're watching it now. It's a bit of a disillusionment to see how god-awful it is - I was 15 when it came out and thought it the height of romance and good story-telling. I remember riding around with my friends and listening to my cassette single of the awful theme song by Bryan Adams, and just hoping one day I'd find love as true as Robin and Marion's. I suppose my husband will have to do.

What else is happening? February has flown and March always feels like the real start of the new year to me. The zoo is reopened, and the four year old is looking forward to seeing real tortoises in action ("I'm a little nervous," he confessed, but he still can't wait). We have birthdays and spring breaks and Easter upcoming, longer days and shorter nights (the nights seem plenty short already, I'm beginning to look forward to the twins' departure for college as the next sure time I can sleep through the night).

I also have a new theory about why women live longer, on average, than men. If the last years of a full lifespan are spent gradually losing your context, then men have at least a decade's head start. My husband (and sons, too, actually) couldn't find the couch he's sitting on without a map, for example. My mother, who is not old but aspires to be, is getting to be almost as bad. She opened the freezer yesterday to check our stockpile of butter and grumbled as she closed the door that she can't find anything in there - I opened the door myself and was immediately confronted with a bright yellow box reading "BUTTER" in big letters on the side. Crazy old bat (I say that with love).

Things are all so comfortable and pleasant, I half-fear that the other shoe will somehow drop, but it's hard to sustain paranoia when life feels so good. It does leave less to complain about, though - I'll try to find more to write about despite the absence of grievances.

Little boys are weird

I always knew I wanted kids, but somehow I imagined myself with a large family of mostly girls. I am still sometimes surprised by the reality of life with four boys, and the huge differences between the boys and girls. I can't believe there was a whole generation back in the 70s and 80s that asserted that there are no innate differences between the sexes. And people say the drugs now are strong.

The kids had two days off from school this week - Monday for that trumped-up commercial joke of a holiday, Presidents' Day, and yesterday for...rain. Cold rain. Whatever. It's meant a lot of togetherness with public enemy number one, aka my 6 year old. Monday was possibly my worst day ever with him, which is certainly saying something. Yesterday was surprisingly not awful, leading me to hope that things were improving in the me-envying-mother-cats-who-can-eat-their-young area. Today, he has reverted to type, being mean as a snake to his brother, having extremely selective hearing, and throwing shit all over the house how hard is this goddamned rule DO NOT THROW SHIT IN THE HOUSE. We still have a broken window from 2 years ago - when home repairs are undertaken at this glacial speed, it's just good sense not to encourage projectiles in the house, right?

Against all logic, I let the 6 year old have two friends over for a sleepover tonight. Also against all logic, so far it's going really well. Sometimes adding kids really does make things easier (something I often tell people who seem surprised by our herd, but sometimes I wonder if it's true). Favorite moments so far include three half naked heathens streaking through the kitchen and into the bathroom, led by 6 year old yelling "follow me! into the shower!" A few minutes later, I heard the 4 year old tell his little brother, "push my nipple and see what happens." As of this typing, there is screaming and thumping coming from upstairs, but it seems to be of the happy variety. So far, anyway.

My life in bullets

I've had good intentions and poor follow-through on my blog this month. Topics I've meant to write about and haven't (and almost certainly won't get around to at this point):

• Taking classes (I'm awesome! All 100%s so far!)
• Teaching a class (big suck, hate it this semester, not doing it again)
• The primary election (I just voted, after changing my mind about who to vote for at least 37 times in the past week)
• Tae Kwon Do (enrolled 2 of the boys, and it seems to be making them lovely, who knew, crazy 4 year old even wore clothes with a face on them, unprecedented)
• Bingo ("Balls!" I went on Saturday and am totally hooked, must go again soon, totally worth the money just to see the bizarre subculture even when you don't win)
• Volunteering (still awesome, excellent motivation not to do drugs/go insane/drive into things/walk drunk down dark streets in front of traffic)
• The twins (trying to wean, still not sleeping, cute but speechless, girl peed on the potty twice but then lost interest)

See how much I talk to you all in my head? Isn't it faster to just get the Clif's Notes like this?

Me and Percy

I finally named the cat. We got him in September, and never settled on a name. My friend and her kids call him Cookie, because of the way I obtained him (from a stranger in a car at the park, just as we warn children not to take things). A couple of my children call him Panther, which is actually a pretty good name for him, as he is large and black and half-wild. Most of us just call him Kitty, but as he seems to double in size each week, that's starting to seem silly. This week, as the stupid cat tried over and over to get into my water glass, it occurred to me that his most distinctive character trait is persistence - maddening, insane persistence. Thus he has become Percy, at least to me. Percy, the cat of a thousand names.

It dawned on me this morning that I have a narrow but distinctive persistent streak myself (persistent sounds so much nicer than stubborn). I've always thought of myself as fairly wishy-washy, but on the few occasions that I actually commit myself to a goal, I don't let much deter me. Including common sense. I seem to have set myself just such a goal with this medical school madness. This morning, after being up almost literally all night with a stomach virus that left everyone else after 24 hours but really really likes me and does not want to leave, I drove to school at 7am in ice and rain, only to discover that the college had a one hour delay. I made good use of the delay in the bathroom in the student union (I'd better be thinner after this), and then proceeded to my 2 hour physics class, where I had to engage way more actively than my tired, dehydrated, ill body wanted me to in an experiment involving a bowling ball. I made it through without any horrifying incontinence-related emergencies, then returned to my car, only to discover that I had forgotten to hang my parking pass and had therefore received a ticket. And despite this, I fully intend to go back for more on Monday. Although hopefully without being a host for 8 zillion nasty stomach viruses.