It's a World Gone Mad

Clearly, that series against the Angels was only a warmup for the arse-whuppin' we're in for at the hands the FIRST PLACE KANSAS CITY ROYALS.

I think I need to go lie down now.

How Bad it Got

The Day After

From: Concerned Co-Worker
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:41 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess

are u ok?


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:45 AM
To: Concerned Co-Worker

Pretty far from it, actually.


From: Concerned Co-Worker
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:46 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess

We got robbed - I don't know what they were thinking.


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:52 AM
To: Concerned Co-Worker

It doesn't matter any more. I've decided to become a Cleveland Indians fan.


From: Concerned Co-Worker
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:55 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess

That is crazy talk. You are not abandoning your team!!!


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 9:59 AM
To: Concerned Co-Worker

I can't take the Twins' brand of baseball any more. I need a team that's willing to pay to keep its talent, not pass it on for not even a handful of f*cking PROSPECTS.

Besides which, Grady Sizemore is HOTT.


From: Concerned Co-Worker
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 10:00 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess

You are changing teams for a piece of as$. I am so disappointed in you.


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 10:06 AM
To: Concerned Co-Worker

It's always been about the butts. I've never pretended differently.



The Day After The Day After

From: Sister Meghan
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008, 8:01 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: HYA

How are you today? Feeling better?


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 8:08 AM
To: Sister Meghan
Subject: RE: HYA

I think I'm having an existential crisis. Asking the hard questions.

I'm also thinking of taking up ceramics. That seems like a nice, non-painful hobby, and at least I'd have something to SHOW for it.


From: Sister Meghan
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 10:18 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: RE: HYA

What hard questions are you asking?


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 10:29 AM
To: Sister Meghan
Subject: RE: HYA

Oh, you know, questions like:

Why would I continue to be a Twins fan when every time I grow to really love a player, they disappear to the free agent market or get traded for a microphone?

Should I quit baseball all together? Could I if I even wanted to?

Or, should I just quit the Twins and find myself another team? Because, clearly, I am constitutionally incapable of NOT becoming overly emotionally invested, to the point where my mental stability is in peril.

And, if I do abandon baseball, or even just the Twins, then what exactly does that leave me with? Who would I be then?

Those kinds of hard questions.

And, of course, the hardest one of all—how interested am I, really, in living in a world without Johan?


From: Sister Meghan
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 10:32 AM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: RE: HYA

Well, you could become a Mets fan. At least he didn't go to the Yankees....


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 10:41 AM
To: Sister Meghan
Subject: RE: HYA

Yes, thank God for that. It is a small consolation that he's gone to the National League, which means I'll hardly ever have to SEE him pitch in another team's uniform. I don't know if my heart could take it.

Or, make that, I don't know if the cold, dead space that used to be my heart could take it.


A Few Days After That

From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Monday, February 4, 2008, 10:50 AM
To: Batgirl
Subject: Johan

None of my co-workers were at all surprised that I took a sick day on Wednesday.

On Thursday I took down all the photos that I had up at work.

The next, and most painful, step will be to take down all the stuff at home and put away my jersey.

And I am straight-up mad at everybody.


From: Batgirl
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 1:41 PM
To: EverydaySuperGoddess
Subject: Johan

i know, i know. i've chosen to pretend it hasn't happened.


From: EverydaySuperGoddess
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 1:49 PM
To: Batgirl
Subject: Johan

Yes. That's probably best.

Except that, well, the change will become painfully apparent on opening day, when a certain butt is noticeably not doing a certain waggle on the pitcher's mound.

(*Insert pained, weepy sigh here.*)

But then again, I probably won't be able to see anything through the tears, anyway.

I serously cried for five hours on Tuesday night. I came home from work, grunted in the general direction of the children, and then went directly to bed with a box of tissues and a pizza. The girls didn't even know it had happened until My Ho called and told them.

DemiGoddess the Elder made me snickerdoodles.

OhPleaseOhPleaseOhPleaseOhPleaseOhPlease

12:15 p.m., from Peter Gammons
• Don't expect to see a Twins-Red Sox or Twins-Yankees whopper. The sense is now that Minnesota will hold onto Johan Santana.

I've been obsessively checking and re-checking every rumor blog and news wire since early Monday morning. Never in my life have I paid any attention whatsovever to these kinds of offseason wranglings, but this is Mi Corazón we're talking about now.

Every time I start to think that maybe, maybe this could happen and I'll still, someday, be close to okay, then I think of next year's American Leaguge Championship series, and the possibility of the Twins maybe going into Game 1 to face Johan Santana starting for the Red Sox, and then I just want to die.

I Have an iPod!

I have an iPod!
I have an iPod!
I have an iPod!

I pretended for a really long time that I didn't want one at all, because I didn't WANT to want one. But really I DID. And now I have one of my very own, and it is all silvery and awesome and full of This American Life podcasts and music that is inapproproate for children.

Joy.

Maybe With a Squeeze of Fresh Lime

It’s been a few days since I posted, so I thought that today I’d share the e-mail I wrote this morning in response to my lovely sister’s inquiry as to how I’m doing:

Well, yesterday I took the morning off of work to try and fix a pipe that was leaking water all over my basement. I thought I had fixed it, and it IS better, but it's still dripping. I think I put a part on wrong, which means I have to take it all apart again. Just about every six months, it seems, some random bit of my house starts dripping/leaking/spurting water. It's awesome.

Last night I busted a DemiGoddess (who shall remain nameless) in the middle of chatting online in Facebook. I've told the Demis that they're not allowed to do online chat rooms, and My Space is forbidden. I never mentioned Facebook specifically, but given that it wasn't until my third inquiry that she finally admitted what she was doing, I'm pretty sure she knew I would not be okay with it. The cable modem is in my purse until further notice.

Yesterday after a visit to her friend's house, the other DemiGoddess (who shall also remain nameless) walked in the door and said to me, "This is going in my memoir, and you are NOT going to look good." My offense? Making her walk home from her friend’s house, which is half a mile away (the same distance as the coffee shop that she walks to at least once a week). With gas at $3.40 a gallon, I will not be driving her a half mile to anywhere.

I didn’t bother to mention that the only reason she got to go to her friend's house after school at all was because I was so distracted by the dripping pipe yesterday morning that I forgot to tell her I had changed my mind about letting her go based on the latest grade update on the school website. Specifically, her grade in Chorus, which was a letter that a person would basically have to be sleeping through Chorus class to receive.

After fighting unsuccessfully with our CD-R drive and ending up listening to the playlists on the Demis' iPods in the car on the way to the lake for Mother’s Day weekend, last week I finally broke down and ordered a refurbished 4 GB Nano for myself. I'm simultaneously wracked with guilt over spending money on such a frivolity and obsessively checking the "Order Status" link on the Apple website to see when it’s coming and where it is today (Sacramento).

Other than that I've pretty much been driving the Demis around (to places that are more than half a mile away) and watching crappy-ass baseball on TV.

Except for last night's game, which was magnificent.

I bought a bottle of cherry lambic at Trader Joe's last week and I'm thinking seriously about drinking the entire thing tonight while I watch the "Lost" season finale.

Aren't you glad you asked?

1+1 = So Out of Luck

Remember a few months back, when I did some significant upgrading to my home PC? I had finally started using a digital camera, there was the blogging, the Demis were pining for iPods, and they were both increasingly using the computer for Important! Homework! My old desktop computer was just not cutting the mustard, so, with a little help, I installed a new processor and a new motherboard, boosted the memory and upgraded the software. And for a while, it was all very exciting and good.

The irony, of course, is that the upgrades have allowed the DemiGoddesses to become heavy users of things like iTunes, YouTube and instant messaging. And with just the one desktop PC for the three of us, well, let’s just say that the math hasn’t worked out quite the way I had hoped. I've been forced to come up with some very creative chore assignments just to be able to check my e-mail ("This dog needs waxing. And you, go rotate your dresser drawers. Do I have to do everything around here?").

Oh, the bickering.

So, a couple of weeks ago, when my workplace announced a drawing for a bunch of used IBM Thinkpads, I was all over it. With a laptop, thought I, I would finally be able to get some screen time at home. Why, I could even take a laptop to the neighborhood Cairbou Coffee, where I could drink expensive coffee drinks with whipped cream and candy bits piled on top while I blog, just like the cool kids.

So last week I was thrilled to learn that I had won one of those used IBM Thinkpads, and once again enlisted my skilled and generally high-quality friend Daniel to get me set up with a wireless network. Which he did, again, for the price of a sandwich from Jimmy John’s.

And just last night, after some network wrangling and one more trip to MicroCenter for an Ethernet cable (and, since I am incapable of leaving that store with only the item I went in to buy, a wireless mouse that is SO COOL), we went live.

…aaaaand within fifteen minutes, DemiGoddess the Elder was adding photos to her blog on the desktop PC, while DemiGoddess the Younger was researching current events for school on the Thinkpad.

At which point I went out to the backyard to scratch my next blog post in the dirt with a pointed stick.

Successful Living with a Teenage Daughter in Four Easy Steps

Step 1—No matter what outrageous, baiting, completely detached from reality utterance comes out of her mouth, DO NOT RESPOND. Do not speak. Don’t even open your mouth.

Step 2—Go directly into your bedroom.

Step 3—Shut the door.

Step 4—Stay there until*:

a) She graduates from high school; or

b) She no longer has any memory whatsoever of what she was angry about in the first place (usually about two hours).

*Alcohol consumption is optional.

Snow Day

So, we got a little snow.

It started yesterday morning, with predictions of up to 20 inches, and by lunchtime enough had accumulated on the roads that pretty much everyone at my workplace headed for home. I left at 1:30, and because I was still a little achy in spots from shoveling the dump we got over the weekend, I decided to stop at Target on the way to pick up an extra shovel. We already have two, but there are three of us in the Goddess household, and I wouldn’t want anyone to have to miss out on the fun.

I searched all over the store without seeing a single snow shovel anywhere. It’s March in Minnesota, three feet of snow is in the forecast, and all they’re selling at Target is frilly Easter dresses, flip flops and swim goggles. I could have picked up a very nice new set of patio furniture, but I still kind of like my old set:

Anyone up for a barbecue?

Not one freaking snow shovel. God Bless America.

The first time I cleared the driveway was around 5:00 p.m., and at that time there were about ten inches on the ground.

All evening, the Demis kept their eyes fixed on the bottom of the TV screen as the list of announced school closings scrolled past. Around 9:00 p.m. we received word that our city had called the first snow day in fifteen years. There was much rejoicing. Shortly after that came confirmation that my workplace would also be closed, and there was further rejoicing. Although, since I was tired and my back hurt, it was mostly on the inside. A tiny fist pump and a "whoo" was about all I could manage.

I went out again at 10:30 p.m. and shoveled another four or five inches, and by then I was throwing snow up onto piles that were a good four feet high on either side of the driveway.



Super fun.

So today we're all home. The snow stopped falling some time during the night, and the DemiGoddess have both gone sledding with friends. I’ll need to get out there and clear off the driveway once more before I’ll be able to get my car out of the garage. But I think I’ll wait until this ibuprofen kicks in first.

Jeebus Take The Wheel

DemiGoddess the Elder took driver’s ed class at the high school last fall. At the end of the quarter, she passed the written permit test, and after that I took her to our neighborhood licensing bureau to get her driver's permit card. We filled out forms. She had her picture taken.

So you’d think it would have occurred to me that now I am supposed to take her driving. In MY CAR. And actually LET HER DRIVE MY CAR.

Somehow, though, the reality of the situation didn’t set in until her card arrived in the mail. Turns out, it's much harder to live in denial when one is staring at a photo of one’s child on a lerner’s permit.

I told her, sure, I’ll take you driving. Just as soon as you’ve had your behind the wheel training. It sounded perfectly logical at the time, but was really just a desperate stall tactic as I put forth a monumental effort to hide the fact that I was completely freaking out.

I said, since it’s the holidays and all, maybe wait to schedule your first lesson until January.

Because, you know. January will never come.

Except that here it is, January, and she had her first behind the wheel session yesterday after school. When I asked her how it went, she said it had been fine. She was too scared to go on the busy streets, but she did get up to 30 mph on the side streets, which felt really fast. And she hadn’t hit anything, so that was good. Then she said her instructor would be calling me later that evening. Apparently she’s supposed to have been practicing already, and I have wasted my money by allowing her to take behind the wheel training before she’s had any driving experience.

“Yah,” the guy said when the call came. “She needs a lot more practice. Take her over to the school on a weekend and have her drive around the parking lot, then. She needs to be able to go on those busy streets before I take her out again, doncha know.”

I was being chastised by what sounded like a 150-year-old driving teacher from Lake Wobegon. Sheepishly, I thought, I know. I can do that. We’ll just start slow. It will be fine.

Then he said, “She needs to learn to look right when she’s turning right, and look left when she’s turning left."

Wait, what? She needs to learn that?

When Demi the Elder was a toddler, I bought her one of those Playskool Tyke Bike riding toys. The day I bought it, I eagerly set it on the sidewalk for her, and she toddled over, turned around, and plopped her diapered butt down on the seat. Backwards.

I learned an important parenting lesson that day—Do not to take for granted that some things will be obvious. As in, when you sit on the riding toy, you’re supposed to face the handlebars.



And, similarly, when you're driving the car, you’re supposed to look left when you’re turning left, and right when you’re turning right. Okay then.

But the thing is, a Honda Civic can do considerably more damage than a plastic riding toy. And, my car may be old, but I only have the one.

And, seriously. Where the hell was she looking?

De-NIED

In putting together my annual Excel spreadsheet of the gifts I will be purchasing between now and Christmas (What? What??), I was super excited over the prospect of ordering two of the cutest little items ever. Tiny, shiny iPods! With engraving, no less!

I had visions of the DemiGoddesses opening their bitty packages on Christmas morning, gasping with joy, and then leaping over piles of discarded wrapping paper to fling their arms in ecstatic gratitude around their uber cool Goddess of a mother, who so clearly has her thumb on the pulse of everything that is cutting-edge and hip with the youngsters.

The next day, I began laying the groundwork...

“Have you seen those new baby iPod Shuffles? They’re sooooo cuuuuuute!”

…and was quickly shot down.

“I don’t want a Shuffle. I want a 30 GB video iPod.”

“Me neither. I want a Nano. A red one.”

Yeah. Not so much. Even if I were not morally opposed to the idea of buying teenagers expensive (as in, costing more than $79) high-tech electronic gadgets that they will probably break or lose or that will very likely be stolen from their lockers at school within a matter of days (which I am), no amount of Excel spreadsheet wrangling is going to work either of those items into my holiday budget.

After some negotiations, the three of us worked out an arrangement in which I will simply give to each of them the cash I would have spent on their Shuffles (no engraving for ME, sniffle), which they will then add to their respective iPod funds so that they can eventually purchase for themselves the items that they really want.

Gone are the days when I could work some clearance-aisle wizardry and produce a glee-inducing Christmas haul for $50. This year the Demis will be getting cash in a box, which may yet be glee-inducing, but is considerably less fun for ME.

Sigh.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Sleep Deprived DemiGoddess

DemiGoddess the Younger was born slightly prematurely, so she had to spend the first week of her life in the intensive care unit. Her lungs hadn’t quite finished cooking yet, and the doctors put her on a respirator to help her breathe. After her first night of intubation, one of the nurses in the NICU told me they’d had to give my newborn daughter sedatives during the night because she wouldn’t stop trying to yank out her respirator tube.

“She’s a feisty one,” the nurse said with a knowing nod.

Thirteen years later, my girl has grown into a young woman who is capable of deep compassion and genuine kindness. But there have been many moments since that morning in the hospital when I’ve thought to myself, that child was born pissed off, and it’s been downhill ever since. When she is out of sorts, the only appropriate response is to duck and cover. Because Ms. Younger never, ever, suffers alone.

Mornings are a particularly touchy time, and since school started last fall, the alarm clock has been a recurring point of contention. The DemiGoddesses share a bedroom, and the only clock radio in it technically belongs to Demi the Elder. She sets the alarm at night and, when it goes off in the morning, Ms. Elder gets up, crosses the room, hits the snooze button and then goes back to bed for a few more minutes. This happens multiple times before she turns on the bedroom light and gets dressed.

Meanwhile, Demi the Younger, who leaves for school half an hour earlier than her sister, has slept right on through the whole thing, and when the lights come on, more often than not, she is already running late. And someone must pay.

Day after day Ms. Younger would berate her older sister for not waking her up sooner, as she stomped around, slamming doors, hissing and spraying venom from her eyeballs. And if she happened to have stayed up past her bedtime the night before? Heaven help us all.

I know from experience that trying to engage my child in any sort of debate at this point will only escalate the foulness, but yesterday she was at it again, and I interrupted her rant to point out, in a slightly less than entirely patient tone of voice, that an important part of learning to behave like an adult person includes taking responsibility for getting one’s own arse out of bed in the mornings.

Clearly, something was going to have to change. So last night I bought her her own clock radio. One with big green numbers on the display, so she’ll be able to read it without her glasses. She gratefully kissed me when she saw it, and merrily took it to her room to set it up.

Both the radio and the beeper alarms went off on schedule this morning, but instead of getting up immediately, DemiGoddess the Younger played her own round of snooze tag. By the time she left her bed, she was even more late than usual. This time, though, she had no one to blame but herself, and the quiet at the breakfast table was almost eerie. Which is good. Because I was about ready to look into getting her some more of those sedatives.

I Don’t Recall Buying a Ticket for this Ride and I Would Like to Get Off Now, Please

When DemiGoddess the Elder told me that she wanted to go to the homecoming dance with a group of girlfriends, I thought, okay. She’s in high school now. That sounds like fun, and it's nice that girls nowadays don't find it necessary to have a date in order to attend the dance.

When she told me she’d need a dress to wear to the dance, I thought, ack, not in the budget, and anyway, why does she need a dress-up dress if she’s just going with girlfriends?

Then I was ashamed of myself for assuming that the only reason for her to dress up would be to go somewhere with a boy. So we went dress shopping, and luckily found a gorgeous, perfectly age-appropriate little number (at a deep, deep discount, no less), that we both loved. Score one for Mom. She looked beautiful she had a wonderful time at the dance.

A few weeks later Ms. Elder announced that the Sadie Hawkins dance was coming up in November. Apparently, at school they had collected requests of music to play at the dance, and she mostly just wanted to go and see if they'd play the They Might Be Giants song she had requested. Really. Most of her friends had boys in mind to ask, and well, yeah, there was a boy she was thinking about asking too.

(Cue the screaming in my head.)

As casually as I could manage, I asked her to tell me about this potential date rapist young man. He plays football and hockey (oh, dear…), is in advanced math (hopeful...), and he watches Project Runway (how soon can he move in?).

So, I wondered, what is the next appropriate parenting move here? Do I Google him and his parents and his next door neighbors? Check to make sure none of his immediate family members are listed in the national sex offender registry? Stake out his house and sift through his trash to check for drug paraphernalia and/or "Thank you for your generous contribution to the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign!" letters?

I just barely started letting my daughter ride her bicycle out of my eyesight, and I'm supposed to just let her go off with some hockey-playing hormone with legs? I think not.

Then I remembered to inquire about his name.

Jacob.

Last name?

Wood.

The Goddess is going to need more mixer.

Three Gray Hairs

New ones. Right there on my right temple this morning. The tweezer is never far from my bathroom mirror these days.

I’ve promised the woman who cuts my hair that soon, very soon, I will visit her and ask her to do The Coloring. I have never done The Coloring before, ever. There are precious few aspects of my physical appearance that I genuinely kind of like, but the color of my hair is near the top of the list. I’d like it to stay the way it is.

My neighbor Leah has a lot of friends who live in lakeside homes in the more affluent Minneapolis suburbs, friends who sail competitively on the weekends, wear designer fashions, and have dazzlingly white teeth and perfect manicures. They’re all married and have small children, and are not (SO not) my usual crowd.

So last weekend at Leah's birthday party, I spent most of the night outside on the deck with the smokers and Tammy, who is also from our neighborhood. Tammy sails on the weekends, too, and she drives a BMW, but she, like me, is a single mom with older children, and after hearing about her Home Depot adventures, I knew she was one person at that party I could hang with.

Well into the evening, out on the deck, the topic of conversation turned to botox. One party guest confessed to getting regular injections around her eyes (“I get them every three months. They only cost about $300 each!). Another said she gets them in her chest (!). My favorite, though, was the woman who said she was going to have collagen put in her heels because her feet are ugly. Tammy and I exchanged a look before she said out loud what I had been thinking. “You pay someone $300 every three months to inject poison into your face? I really don’t get that.”

At first, didn’t get it, either. But then I remembered an evening a couple of weeks before, when Tammy had mentioned some kind of magic lotion that she’d picked up on a recent trip to New York. “It’s like botox in a lotion!” She had exclaimed, applying it to the skin around the corners of her eyes. “See? My face doesn’t even MOVE!” And then I remembered my own tweezers. I’m pretty sure that botox isn’t for me, not even in lotion form, but really, isn’t paying a colorist to hide my gray more or less the same thing? Aren’t we all, in our own way, dreading something, whether it’s the wrinkles or the ugly feet or the gray hairs? In the end, the unfortunate truth is that I’m no less superficial than any of those botox babes.

I haven’t decided yet how many gray hairs I will tolerate before I make the appointment for The Coloring. I guess it will be when I can no longer keep them at bay with the tweezers. Until this morning there were only four gray strands I was keeping a regular eye on. Every time one of them grew long enough to be visible, I’d yank it out again. But today there were three more, all at once. They, like the others, have been temporarily banished. And I know exactly where these new three came from:

#1—Parent orientation night. And probably the post-orientation heavy drinking.

#2—Two days’ worth of family drama involving my sisters, my sister-cousins, a couple of second cousins (one of whom is a convicted felon, and the other of whom is an overbearing ass) and the cabin that we all jointly own.

#3—Yesterday’s visit from the contractor and the insurance adjustor, who decided that the outside wall of my sunroom, the one with the water damage, will need to be completely knocked out and rebuilt. Look! Carpenter ants! Oh, and, by the way? Insurance isn’t going to pay for most of this. Sorry!

So at work this morning, fully tweezed but still teetering on the brink of completely losing my sh*t, I couldn’t help but be impressed by my own super-human powers of self control when the Marketing Deity plopped his generously-kissed seat down into the chair in my cubicle and tried to entice me into a wager on this weekend’s Twins/Yankees series.

I said to him, “Did you come here just to torment me? Because the Yankees are already in first place, Silva is pitching tonight, and I am in NO MOOD.”

He took me at my word.

Huh. Maybe I Should Have That Checked.

The rocket ship lunchbox was really only the tip of the iceberg.

Last Tuesday was parent orientation night at the high school. The principal welcomed all of us freshman parents, and congratulated us on having done such a great job of raising the class of 2010. As soon as he said that, I nearly started to bawl, right there in the auditorium.

The entire time the chemical guidance counselor was speaking, about the occasional school-wide sweeps with drug sniffing dogs, and about how we, as parents, must model responsible behavior, all I could think about was how much I wanted to get home and consume uncharacteristically large amounts of vodka.

When it was over, I went to the grocery store (for limes and club soda to mix with my vodka) and I saw a man walking in the parking lot, holding the hand of a little girl. And I nearly started weeping again.

In the checkout line I ran into DemiGoddess the Elder’s Girl Scout troop leader, who had also just come from the parent orientation. She, unlike me, seemed to have been completely unscathed by the experience, and was surprised that I had found the whole thing so distressing. She reassured me that Ms. Elder is a terrific kid, and I have nothing to worry about with her. Which was comforting, but really, I already knew that.

Clearly, something is going on here that is deeper than your run-of-the mill parental angst, and it has very little to do with Demi the Elder herself. I’m not sure what my issue is exactly, but I do know it’s mine. And yeah, I’m taking it to someone who can help me name it.

We're All Still In High School On The Inside

Shopping for school supplies for the DemiGoddesses has evolved beyond markers and crayons, school glue, tape, and safety scissors. The scientific calculators I bought them for school last year still work fine, so during our shopping trip to Target last night, all we put into our cart was a pile of composition books, some loose leaf paper, a supply of pens and binders.

DemiGoddess the Younger’s binder is one of those elaborate canvas-covered, multi-zippered and pocketed organizer systems, complete with accordion-style colored plastic dividers and a clip-on shoulder strap for portability. (Yeah. It’s THAT big). DemiGoddess the Elder, on the other hand, opted for your standard 2-inch, heavy-duty, vinyl three-ring binder. It opens. It closes. It's white. Her binder is utilitarian and, most imporantly, customizable. She'll embellish it herself later with Sharpie markers.

I’ve been surprised to find myself far more daunted by the idea of Demi the Elder entering high school than I ever was by kindergarten or even junior high. And my worries go far beyond the obvious perils of her upcoming entry into driver's ed class. High school is when life starts to get real. Her high school experience, for better or worse, can have major fallout well into her future. For the next four years, doing or not doing her homework will directly impact her grades, which will impact her eligibility for scholarship money and her college options, which will, in turn, impact the career path she’ll be on for the REST OF HER LIFE. We're about to enter the parenting home stretch, the time for making any last-minute corrections is running out, and the overwhelming prospect of doing it wrong—of ME allowing HER to do it wrong—has me practically paralyzed with anxiety.

And, obviously, I would very much like the social aspects of her high school experience to be an improvement over my own (not that that would be difficult). Like any parent, I'm trying to learn how to walk that precarious line between allowing her live her own life, and doing everything in my power to prevent her from making mistakes that she might look back on, twenty years from now, and regret.

I do realize that all of these issues are more about me than they are about her. And I’ve tried to keep them mostly to myself. So far, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping a lid on my insanity. But last night at Target, the lunch box aisle completely blew my cover.

DemiGoddess the Younger had already selected a sassy pink two-handled tote style insulated lunch bag, complete with it's own mini freezer pack. But when it came to Demi the Elder, I wondered out loud, “What do high school kids carry their lunches in? One of these insulated things? Brown bags? Do the cool kids just take hot lunch?”

Demi the Younger looked at me skeptically. “The ‘cool’ kids?”

“I don’t want hot lunch,” Demi the Elder said. “The cafeteria food is gross.” Then she took a colorful rocket ship-shaped lunch box off the shelf. “This one is cool,” she laughed. And it was. But the ninth-grader that I apparently still am, somewhere, deep down, was having none of it.

“You’d bring your lunch to high school in a rocket ship lunch box? Won't the older kids make fun of you?"

"They do that at the high school?" asked Demi the Younger.

"Sure they do," I said. "'Hey there little freshman, what did your mom pack in your rocket ship lunch box for you, little freshman?'”

Demi the Younger’s look changed from skepticism to sympathy. “You were really traumatized in high school, weren’t you?”

It’s going to be a long four years.

Waiting to Exhale

I’ve been anxious lately. I’ve turned to every one of my worst nervous habits—nibbling on cookies, shopping for things I don’t really need, spending way too much time online—to no avail.

My fate has been in the hands of the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees. And that? Is not a happy place to be.

But today, finally, I can almost breathe again…


P.S. Today my anxious nibbling will be on a Blizzard® treat, because that way I'll be helping out my local children's hospital at the same time. Would you like one too? More info is here. Find the location of your nearest participating DQ® location here.

Mmmmmm... Blizzards...

I’d Invite You Over, But You’d Have to Park in Duluth

The street in front of my house has been torn up for a couple of weeks now. What used to be blacktop is now a wide muddy trough full of bulldozers and blinky hazard markers and large men in orange vests. The trough is a good three feet below where the street used to be, and the curbs and driveway aprons are completely gone, so a steep gravel ramp temporarily allows me to get in and out of my driveway. Assuming that an earth mover hasn’t parked in front of my house, that is.

The work is scheduled to continue through the summer, and the thought of that is exhausting, because I never know from one day to the next what I’ll find when I arrive at my street. Some days one end is open, some days that same end has a huge hole full of workers in the middle of it, and I have to circle the block and try the other end. Sometimes that end turns out to have a giant pile of gravel blocking the way, and I have to circle back around and try the other end again. A more evolved individual might find this recurring challenge exciting, but I am not a person who likes having my routine f*cked with. At the end of the day, I just want to get my sorry self home, I don’t want to have to strategize new ways to get into my own blessed driveway on a daily basis.

To make matters worse, the parking lot of the building where I work is also being re-surfaced. Half of the lot looks eerily like the street in front of my house, which means that the number of available parking spaces has been cut in half. Yeah. You do the math. I’ve been arriving early enough in the mornings to find a spot without too much trouble, but on the one day when I made the mistake of leaving for lunch, the only available parking space when I returned was next to a dumpster. In Winnipeg.

Last Friday, after dodging a steamroller and weaving my way through the orange cones, I arrived home from work to find a bright pink notice attached to my front door informing me that, due to some utility work, the water would be turned off for most of the day on Monday. The notice included instructions for filling the bathtub with water, which could then be used to keep the toilet tank flushing until the water was turned back on.

The DemiGoddesses are astonishingly capable young women, but I really didn’t want them to have to deal with that all day. Knowing that one of The Ex’s sisters was in town with her new baby and would be staying at The Ex’s parents’ house, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, and called The Ex’s mother to see if the Demis could spend Sunday night and Monday at her house as well. That way they could visit with their aunt and the baby, and be away from our house until the water was back on.

It seemed like a reasonable plan, except that making the arrangements turned out to involve much more hemming and hawing, taking of votes and general drama than I had anticipated, for reasons that rest entirely on shoulders of The Ex and the Universally Hated Step Psycho. Though the details are highly entertaining and I would very much love to share them, it seems that The Ex has been reading this blog for some time now and has taken issue with a few of the things I have written here. In spite of that, relations of late have been cordial (sort of), and for the sake of the children and my own serenity, I am trying to play nice. So I’m not going to post the specifics of what transpired. If you want the dirt, you’ll have to e-mail me.

In the end, the Demis did spend the night at their grandparents’ house. They had some quality time with their aunt and the baby, and enjoyed a lovely day with their grandmother on Monday, including going out for lunch. So I was feeling pretty good about having handled that mini-crisis until I arrived home from work on Monday to find another notice on my door, informing me that the water was going to be turned off again on Tuesday.

Note to Self:

Next summer? At the Pride festival?

Stay the HELL away from the chicken gyro stand, you idiot.

I so do not have time to be sick, but apparently my lower intestine did not get the memo.

Oh, that's okay. Don't worry about me. I'll just be right over here, wishing for death.

I (Heart) Corporate America

I know I need to develop a thicker skin. I’ve been aware of that for a while, actually.

For three days, I sat in roomful of opinionated, overweight white guys, listening to their arguments go around and around for hours, and leaving each day feeling like a bus had run me over and then backed over me and run me over again, just to make sure it had made its point.

After lunch on Wednesday the Marketing Deity himself took a moment to tell me how great it was that I could be there, because most people on my “level” never have an opportunity to see firsthand the important discussions that take place in these meetings.

(Yes! Thank you Marketing Deity! I am so very grateful that you allow a lowly maggot like me to be locked up in a hotel meeting room with these people for three days! Your generosity, it knows no bounds!)

Since Wednesday, his comment has gnawed at me. Since Wednesday, I have been irritated with myself for allowing his comment, which I'm sure neither he nor his staggeringly large ego even remember making, to gnaw at me.

This morning, back into my regular routine and once again in the company of my posse of co-workers, I was enthusiastically reassured that I am not overly sensitive. The man is sorely lacking in the people skills department. And they were happy to provide me with detailed examples in support of this fact.

What a relief to be around people who speak my language again.

(But I’m still going to work on that thicker skin thing.)

In Which I Wallow in Self Pity

The latest agonizing three-day meeting is scheduled to begin next Tuesday. These quarterly meetings are a *BIG DEAL* at my place of employment, and are attended by many vendors, agency reps and important clients from all over the country. Because my job requires me to spend all three days of this meeting seated at a table at the front of a giant hotel meeting room alongside the highest level executives at my corporation (which, by the way, is the only time I am ever seated within three floors of the highest level executives at my corporation), I like to try to dress a little more professionally than normal on those days.

This presents a little bit of a problem.

My office is pro-casual, and at home I’m all about jeans and T-shirts, so there’s never been a lot of professional wear in my closet. Then, three years ago I lost 35 pounds, and around that same time my financial situation went deep, deep into the toilet.

While I managed to gradually restock my everyday wardrobe with size-smaller clothes through a few fortuitous trips to the thrift store and my stint at Old Navy (subtract my employee discount from the clearance price and, yeah, I think I can squeeze $1.79 out of the grocery budget and splurge on this pair of khakis—the children can put water instead of milk on their Cheerios for a couple of days…), to this day, my closet still contains a number of dressier shirts and jackets that I refer to as “my fat clothes.” They don’t fit. They’re unflattering. But they stayed in the closet because it was either them or nothing at all.

My high-school social studies teacher taught me that economics is about using limited resources to satisfy unlimited wants. Although I could debate whether being required by the city to pay them to remove the Dutch elm-diseased tree in my back yard qualifies as a “want,” I have come to understand the concept of prioritizing when funds are limited. So even now that my finances have improved somewhat, the “fat clothes” remain in the closet because the Demigoddesses both needed glasses, Demi the Elder needed braces, the car needed two new distributor caps in two years and, oh yeah, I still don’t know how much the work on my leaky house is going to end up costing me.

But yesterday I decided that enough is enough. After three years, my old clothes have finally reached an acceptable level of depreciation, and I cannot face another agonizing three-day meeting wearing ill-fitting, outdated clothing. So I went to the mall.

Scouring through the clearance racks in four different stores, I came up with two shirts, a beaded cardigan and two jackets, all of which had been marked down at least twice. In all, my new wardrobe cost the extravagant sum of $80.

The guilt set in immediately.

All evening long I silently berated myself for spending such an outrageous amount of money on frivolities in the same month when I paid taxes, had a new master cylinder put on the car, and still have to buy knobs and hinges for all the kitchen cabinets. Just a few days ago, I warned the Demis not to ask me for a single cent—not even lunch money—until the end of the month. And then I went and lost my mind and wantonly flung money all over the mall. What was I thinking?

So I tried all the new clothes on again and gave them one more good look in the mirror. One of the jackets really didn’t fit quite right. And I wasn’t completely in love with the color of one shirt. And the beads on the cardigan? They would probably fall off before too long anyway.

So. Back to the mall with me. I’m keeping one shirt and one jacket and returning the rest. I feel so very reasonable and mature, and I know it’s the right thing to do, but God DAMN it sucks to be a grownup sometimes.