Background Noise

this week has to be better

Aggravating work stuff going on lately. Nothing I can’t handle, just ego stuff. Why is it that in competition with men, women need to be overqualified to be seen as equal when up against a man who is merely qualified? You don't have to answer that, but...is it because of sports? It shouldn’t be a liability that a person doesn’t get a hard-on over baseball statistics.

My shoulder hurts and I had to put myself in a time out from my Wii. I have a killer tennis serve, but if I play much more I won’t be able to do anything useful with my right arm like drive or transfect cells. This might be a sign that I need more exercise.

I need a vacation because I’m beginning to get sour. Twice last week people at work asked me what was wrong because I was sitting around frowning. I didn’t realize I was even doing it. But then Saturday morning one of Eli’s buddies drove by me while I was pumping gas at the gas station and he told Eli that I looked furious. When a passing driver can detect my rage, it means I am wearing my thoughts on my face again and I have to stop it. Because I’m not really angry or unhappy, I’m just tired. I need a break from the endless routine of working and paying bills and working some more and paying more bills and oh look, should’ve paid more attention because we’re out of oil again, but that’s okay because I AM MADE OF MONEY SO I’LL JUST WRITE THIS EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAR CHECK on a random Tuesday night because at this point who gives a shit anymore. I could go to the gas station tomorrow and see that the price went up $8 a gallon overnight and I’d sigh and fill up because I’M ALREADY BENT OVER, HELP YOURSELF! I feel like I'm 80 years-old complaining about inflation, but there is no reason on earth that the weekly grocery bill for my family of three is beginning to resemble a car payment.

We’re planning a vacation. It will all be okay.

vampire

I read the news at work every day on msnbc.com, usually starting with the Entertainment section and ending in Health. The entertainment news is my favorite because celebrities are always up to crazy shit and the stuff they get caught doing never fails to amuse me. I’m not a jerk who gets off on the misery of others, it’s just that sometimes I get a little bored at work. I work for a pharmaceutical company. The most exciting thing to happen at my work in the last six months was the product recall on the buffers we use to standardize our pH meters.

The best week I’ve had at work in a long time was when Britney was going through her public breakdown. Every day was a present, from the paparazzi photos of Brit waving home pregnancy tests around in the air through a drug store window, to the videos of the poor girl being loaded into the back of an ambulance on her way to the psychiatric hospital (to have her fucking head examined because what kind of person in their right mind doesn’t understand that in order to kidnap your own children and get away with it, your hideout destination needs to be a little more clever than A BEDROOM IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HOUSE). 

And health. I force myself to read this stuff because how else am I going to find things to fret over? The medication I’m on gives me horrible nightmares and if I don’t feed my subconscious now and then with truly frightening things, then I will continue to have nightmares about losing my child and accidentally killing my husband and the new one where I’m traveling to New York, except I get on the wrong flight and end up in outer space completely unprepared. I’d much rather dream about real-life scary things like pharmaceuticals in my tap water.

And the other reason I’m a little obsessed with health news is because I am trying to keep an eye on the blood. Specifically any medical news that implicates blood transfusions in the spread of any new diseases. I don’t think it’s normal to be this concerned over something that shouldn’t really be too risky, but I’m a pessimist at heart and I bet all the people who received transfusions of HIV positive blood in the 80s were told the same things about risk that I was told in 2002. I have a sick feeling that at some point it will be discovered that certain cancers can be spread through blood or there will be a new virus with a brilliant incubation period like HIV that hasn’t broken out yet, and I just want to know right away.

Sitting here healthy and alive, I can boldly admit hating the fact that I’ve had a blood transfusion. Which is pretty stupid because when I’m honest, and force myself to remember how I felt lying in that bed in the hospital, suffering through what felt like the worst hangover of my life, and how much better I felt after only a few minutes into the transfusion, well, that is when I make a vow of vampire…ism…cy…?

What I mean is that if it ever came to that again, and I knew I’d feel better if only I could get a little more blood into my body, lock down the blood bank and guard your veins because it’s ON.

cliff notes

I let my account lapse for a bit but today I reactivated everything. And now I’m really writing to myself because who would possibly still check in with me after that kind of abandonment?

Quick update before moving on:

Work is still going great after all this time, Joey turned three last week, I’m starting grad school in two months, last week my therapist determined that I am healed and only need to check in with her every six months or so for medication monitoring. My marriage is still going strong despite Eli’s frivolous spending this month that included a new huge screen TV, updated cable package with high-def and the purchase of tickets to see The Contender finale in Boston that ran into the hundreds of dollars. Cats are all still alive, I was diagnosed with early glaucoma in my left eye, and I’m currently on antibiotics for a finger infection to rule all infections that makes it impossible for me to touch anything with my right index finger without pain ripping through the entire right side of my body. I’ve suffered two crippling migraines over the past six months, and I’ve developed a new respect for my own head and its fragile constitution. The treadmill is my new drug of choice and I run on it every day until I burn at least three hundred calories and achieve the euphoria of believing I am superwoman.

I’m going to update more because the days are going so fast now and I need to slow it down once in a while or before I blink I will be old and all I will remember of this time is that I was busy. I find it nearly impossible to dwell these days, so probably that’s why I’ve taken a break from coming here.

Next time I will tell you about the time I tried to take Chantix to quit smoking and how it’s always important to listen to your own intuition that questions whether it is a good thing to take two brain drugs at the same time no matter what your primary care physician says.

life is good

I see the phrase everywhere. On clothes, on hats, on bumper stickers. Life is good. And every time I see the logo on someone's car or clothes I think that either someone is very naïve or simply trying to convince themselves of something that they wish was so. Because if we’re going to be truthful about it, life cannot be summed up so simply. Of course there are parts of life that are amazingly good, but life overall is difficult and in every life there exists some degree of pain and suffering. I don’t know of a single person whose life is simply good. Maybe if you’re a cartoon.

Don’t worry, I’m not depressed again. The medicine is still working and my life has been going amazingly well lately. But I would never proclaim to the world that life is good because I’ve seen the dark side.

I tape Oprah every day because I don’t want to miss a good guest like Will Smith or Brad Pitt. So that’s how I ended up watching the show about people who tried to kill themselves and survived. The person who made it through the best was the woman suffering from postpartum depression who tried to jump off a bridge. Police officers were able to pull her back over and she’s fine now. But the kid who blew his entire face off with a shotgun and the girl who got her legs ripped off by a train have a few more physical scars.

When I was depressed, I never really thought too much about ending my life, but it did cross my mind. When you’re in pain and desperate for relief but you can’t imagine ever feeling better, it’s just natural. But eventually I got obsessive about an escape plan, not an escape from life overall, but an escape from my life. I figured that if everything was so miserable I could simply change it up and then I would feel better. I realize this kind of thinking is just as sick as suicidal thoughts, because no rational person wakes up and decides that everything in their life is wrong and they need to escape their entire identity and start all over new to feel better.

It still bothers me to hear people talk about postpartum depression. I have some distance now but I remember how it feels. And I can’t help but think how close I came to losing everything. I have no doubt that something chemical happened in my brain after I had Joey, but I don’t really think depression is strictly a hormonal problem. There is such a lack of support for new moms that it surprises me more women don’t flip out after giving birth. You’re suddenly alone with a new baby, everyone is at work and going on with their lives, and you’re not going to work and you’re not sleeping and all of it happens immediately after your body is so violated that all you want to do is just take a little nap because hello! Just had a person ripped from my loins! You pretty much exist to make milk and be puked on and each day feels like a month and you can’t imagine going back to work but diapers and laundry detergent don’t grow on trees and you need a job to afford things like pureed bananas and books on how to get your baby to sleep longer than fifteen minutes at a time. But going back to work means you will be leaving the sole reason for your existence for the past three months with strangers who will charge you an extra mortgage to do something you’ve been doing for free for weeks and weeks, and you know they won’t do it as well as you do, because how could they! How does a person not lose her shit? HOW?

I guess this is my way of saying that I’m not having another baby until society decides to wake up and show a little fucking respect for motherhood. And since I don’t see that ever happening, I will be content with my only child. I’m just glad I got a great one.  

so random, can't think of a title

I’ve been walking around pretty self-righteously for a few weeks because I suddenly have a JOB. But in reality, my job so far has been trying to work out how many coffees I can drink to obtain maximum wakefulness without causing the vitreous humor in my eyes to start vibrating in front of my retinas. I have a lot of administrative work to do before I can get into the lab. On Friday I completed a fifty page test on the biostatistics software I will be using to analyze my data, and I have to do this for pretty much every piece of software and every instrument I will use before I can get a password. For some of it I even have to attend classes, as I found out my first day after orientation week when I went to my desk, opened my calendar and saw that I was scheduled to attend a three-day class in the computer lab. The work isn’t difficult and it fills up the time, but I’ve never spent so much time sitting at a desk before. I guess I’m a lab rat at heart and I’m not happy unless I’m chopping up rat spleens or at the very least handling toxic chemicals that could potentially alter my DNA.

Maybe it’s because I took a break for a year, but I was in a conference on my second week about one of the products in our pipeline, and it suddenly struck me that what I do is really fucking weird. In my last job it was routine to come in every Tuesday, get my supplies ready while waiting on the call from shipping that my box of blood had arrived, and then spend the rest of the morning holed up in a back lab washing the cells and getting them ready for incubation. One of my products was derived from human blood cells and the bags came in fresh from the donation site. If you’ve ever given blood, you know what the bags look like. And it became such a part of my routine that it never really occurred to me that it is not normal to spend four hours every Tuesday morning sitting in front of a biohazard cabinet cutting open blood donation bags (of course only after lightly massaging the bags to break up any clots). The only things I cared about on Tuesdays were that I’d remembered to bring in good CDs and that the person assigned to be my helper for the day (usually a temp) wouldn’t fuck things up or be slow and make me late for lunch. It wasn’t until I brought Eli in with me one Sunday when I had to feed and split my cells that I realized exactly how odd my work is. I showed him my incubator and let him look at my cells under the microscope and then I showed him my chemicals. He just looked around the lab and then at me as though finally comprehending exactly what it is I do everyday and how it may explain some of the curiosities that have developed in my behavior over the last few years.

But I won’t get into that because it’s pointing out the obvious to give examples of the many ways I am strange. 

One of the positive benefits of my job is that tonight we’re going out with friends like normal adults, and we didn’t even have to save up! I’m still having a hard time with the daycare situation, especially after signing my very first accident report this week after Joey decided to try out a belly flop on his mat during naptime. He throws himself around in his crib all the time, and he delights in the way his body bounces on the mattress when he hurls himself from one side of the crib to the other, but his mat is not soft like his mattress and instead of bouncing, he slammed his head hard into the floor.

This has all been a huge adjustment, but things are slowly getting better. I’ve had second thoughts almost every day since I started back to work, but then I go to sleep and wake up the next morning and I know that this is the right thing for all of us.

I’ve been having extremely vivid dreams again, but they’re not necessarily all bad. Like the one I had the other night where I had to take a shower with my boss. Aside from not being able to look at him without blushing the next day, it was relatively easy to get over and much less painful than the nightmares I have where everyone is being killed and there is bloodshed and mayhem. I broke my sobriety again last weekend when Eli and I went to the beach for dinner with some friends and we ended up on the strip at a dance club until the wee hours of morning. Our babysitter thought we were dead and when we finally rolled in around 2am, Eli pointed to me as I stumbled into the house covered in sparkly fish stickers that I had peeled off the walls of the bathroom at the club and stuck all over my body, and told our young friend, “See this? Don’t ever do this to yourself!”

There are a some standard things that happen whenever I drink too much. I always need to go dancing, I always flirt too much, and I always need to bring home souvenirs. I also never want to go home. Because of all these things, I'm pretty sure Eli doesn't want to date me anymore.

I need to take a shower now because I promised Joey we would go to the park this afternoon. I don’t know when I will update again, but thanks for sticking around.

fucking high

Someone was cool enough to send me the James Blunt CD after I talked about it in a previous entry. Thank you so much kind person!

I had no idea flying high was really fucking high and that's the problem with listening to music on the radio. It’s like when I first listened to that Radiohead song on CD and learned that the girl Creep is talking about is not so very special, she is so fucking special. And it makes more sense. Censorship ruins everything.

I ended up posting an ad on craigslist whoring myself out and as of 24 hours later I have received exactly ZERO responses. Excellent. And because of how these things always go, Eli, who is gainfully employed and is contacted at least once a month with offers of employment from people who want to steal him away from his current business, just got a sweet gig teaching a college class this fall. It’s a two hour lecture with a two hour lab, and he will be able to do it in addition to his regular job. And I’m happy for him of course, but it’s like he’s some kind of fucking money magnet. He doesn’t even try. While I sit here trying to figure out how to sell my body parts for cash and hating myself. I never wanted a sugar daddy, and even if Eli was pulling down a seven figure salary, I would still want something of my own.

But I have weird luck. Like yesterday, when I woke up and decided I could either work on the employment thing or give it a rest for a bit and go to the beach for a nice relaxing day in the surf. Since it was almost 100 degrees here in the city, and I was sweating my head off even before 9am, I decided to go to the beach. And lo, while I was there I got a phone call from the original company who didn’t give me the job I wanted, telling me that there is another opening for the job I wanted, and they want me to have it! Me! It makes me feel a little silly for all the self-loathing I did last week. I did indeed rock the interview after all.

So the beach. It was absolutely divine and the first time in a week where I was outside and not sweating at all. I lost at least a gallon of sweat at a cookout on Sunday from chasing Joey around in the ridiculous heat all afternoon. The kid exhausts me. But at the beach he’s in his element. He plays in the sand and swims and doesn’t run away like he does everywhere else in public, and the only bad habit he has is that he likes to grab my sunglasses off my face, pull my bathing suit down and visit with people who are sitting near us on the beach. Oh yeah, and he bit my toe once while we were swimming.

Joey makes friends everywhere he goes because he is bold and unafraid. He made friends with an old lady under an umbrella sitting near us who gave him cookies and talked to him for a long time. Then he made friends with another lady who gave him sunblock for his scalp and his own bottle of cold water to drink.

He also made friends with a little girl who belonged to a couple that Eli and I both agreed are the most beautiful couple we have ever seen. Eli and I sat there in our chairs at the edge of the water, staring at these people who cannot possibly be human, while our children played in the sand at our feet. As I stared at them, and then down at myself, I wondered how it is possible that they could look so collected and beautiful while spending a day with a toddler at the beach. I took my sunglasses off and stared at myself in the reflection to see if I was also rockin the beach with my own beauty, and I was sad to discover I was not. My hair was a mess of dreds collected around my head and reaching for the sun like some kind of gravity-defying, ocean-salt-based medusa wig. My skin and bathing suit were covered in a crust of sand, the result of being the human canvas for the sand-flinging toddler at my feet. And I looked more like something that got washed up on the beach than something that stepped out of the white sands in a glossy mag.

When I got home and took off my bathing suit, I realized that sitting prettily on the beach all day on a blanket with a book and my suntan lotion is very different from spending the day swimming, letting the waves drag me up to shore and dragging around in the shallow water with a toddler. I looked like I was wearing a sand bikini on my skin and when I brushed my hair a delicate sprinkling of sand gathered below me on the floor.

I had to wash my hair three times to get the sand out, and my highlights are looking a little brassy from all the sun and salt, but I don’t care because it was a wonderful day. And when I got home to the news that I may be working again very soon, my decision to ditch responsibility and hit the beach made even more sense. In a few weeks things like the sun and swimming and having a tan will all just be fond memories, as I begin spending my days indoors and taking on the sallow appearance of a lab drudge once again.

But at least I’ll have more cash.

ruining a good spine with scapular art

I like tattoos. I have two, and I’m thinking about getting another one. But the thing about tattoos is you can never be impulsive about it. I know a guy who has a puma tattooed on the inside of his forearm, and while it looks pretty hot when he’s at the beach or wearing casual clothes, it starts to look like a gang symbol or a drunken mistake when he’s dressed up in business attire.

When I got my ankle tattoo a few years ago, capris hadn’t been in fashion for at least a decade and I couldn’t have imagined them ever coming back into style. I reasoned that a huge colorful tattoo on my inner ankle would never be inappropriate because I’d be wearing pants in most business situations, and if there was a need for a skirt, I could put a flesh-colored patch over it to disguise it under pantyhose.

But it’s approaching spring now and I work in an environment where capris and sneakers are completely appropriate work attire, but also where about 50% of the clientele is older—people who associate tattoos with aging sailors and punk drug addicts. Several times I’ve been at work and my pants have slid up past my ankle and whoever I’m sitting with stops and gapes at my leg like they’ve never seen a red hot chili peppers star surrounded by a tribal circle of life etched brightly and permanently into a person’s skin before. And then they look back at me in confusion, as though everything they previously thought about me (a good, nice, sweet, maybe even WHOLESOME girl) was all a big lie. I obviously have a heroin addiction in my past or I’ve been in prison.

(It's difficult to take a picture of your own ankle while hiking your pajama pants up and trying not to fall down)

So I can wear long pants all summer, or just spend every day at work talking about my tattoo and explaining that yes, I like it. No, it wasn’t an impulsive mistake I made during my incarceration. No, I will not be embarrassed about it when I am old.

But I’m starting to rethink the new tattoo I’m planning on paying someone to cut into my body with a sharp needle. I haven’t decided on the exact design yet, but I have an idea of what I want, and I know that I want it on my back. Over my right shoulder blade. And just like my ankle tattoo I feel like I’m pretty safe about the place I’ve chosen to put it. It’s not likely that I’ll ever have the need to wear a tank top to work, as I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where I’d wear a sleeveless shirt to work. But then I think about capris, and it occurs to me that there could someday be a new trend in shirts where shoulder blade cutouts become fashionable. Or maybe there will be a time when we start wearing shirts that only have fronts and sleeves, with the whole back open. It’s unlikely, but so were capris.

I resisted capris for years after they came out because I thought they looked trendy and stupid, and also because I wore them in elementary school when they were called knickers. But over the years my resolve has worn down and now I like them. Especially flowy capris with a nice mid-calf cuff. They look pretty with flip flops and a tan, they’re comfortable, and most importantly, they let your ankles breathe.

So as ridiculous as a backless tee seems to me now, I wonder if I’ll be eating my words and proclaiming the merits of letting your spine breathe in a post about them on this here journal in 2016.

Lost, rocks and ebay

Lost is my favorite television show. I am addicted to it and on Wednesdays when I know there’s a new episode on that night, it feels like Christmas is coming and I can’t wait. The show reminds me of the video game Myst that Eli and I played years ago. We got so hooked on the puzzles and secrets and SHEER FRUSTRATION OF IT ALL that we stayed in playing it over an entire weekend trying to win. (We eventually had to go online to get some help to finish because we were getting ridiculous and exhausted over a stupid game and we wanted to get on with our lives)

But the thing about Lost is that I’m not sure it’s good for me. Because I’m on medicine that affects my brain, a side effect I’ve come to accept is nightmares. It’s a trade-off for being able to function in my waking life better than I have in at least a decade that I have horrible, scary dreams that cause me to wake up terrified in my bed at least three times a week.

And the dreams are all Lost-based. I don’t dream about the characters. But in my dreams, I am playing by the rules of the island. I find myself in situations where I need to hide to avoid capture. And I am always dressed in red or bright pink and I’m trying to hide myself in a landscape of earth tones. There is a security system waiting to kill me if I do things like use electricity, say certain words, or wear certain colors (this may be a little bit of The Village influence sneaking in) And there are always The Others. They are the dream monsters. I never see them, yet they are waiting to capture me.

I realized this morning when I woke up in my bed drenched in sweat after a terrifying dream that seemed to last forever where I was wearing a bright red shirt and trying desperately to hide myself under a fallen tree to avoid The Others, who were on a hunt in the woods searching for me, that perhaps I need to watch a little more Sesame Street and a little less Lost.

I haven’t been updating my journal lately because I’ve been busy. Spring has come and it seems stupid to be at my computer when I could be outside with Joey enjoying the nice weather before the next snowstorm. Joey loves to be outside, and I don’t have to come up with complicated games for us to play when we go out. He prefers to just run along the sidewalk and touch all the parked cars along the street. This used to always be a fun and harmless game, until Joey discovered two rocks in the backyard that have become his hand anchors that he must hold whenever we go outside. We keep them on the front steps, and as soon as we walk out the door, he goes right for the rocks, picks them up, and clutches them in his hands before taking off for another round of car touching. But the thing about touching cars when you have rocks in your hands is that you’re no longer gently touching the neighbors cars with your soft baby fingers, but smashing rocks against them and the neighbors don’t dig that. So I have to be on alert for rock smashing and all the redirecting gets exhausting.

On Thursday Eli took the day off and we all went to the park. Joey held his rocks for the whole two hours we were there.  He held them on the slide, he held them on the swings and he banged them against the seesaw. He tried to share one of his rocks with another baby but as soon as Joey put it in his hand, the kid dropped it like it was a rock. Joey then picked his rock up off the ground and walked away, unwilling to spend another second on a kid who can’t appreciate something so special and magnificent as a rock from the backyard. When it was time to leave, Eli put Joey on his shoulders and Joey banged his rocks into Eli’s head the whole way back to the car. And on the way home he fell fast asleep in his carseat, still clutching his friggin rocks. We may need to substitute the rocks for something softer before someone gets a concussion or one of the neighbors comes after us for a new paint job.

Over the last week I’ve also put a ton of stuff up on Ebay and started to organize for our yard sale. I had no idea Ebay was such a time-consuming pain in the ass. I spent two nights organizing, photographing and creating attractive written descriptions of baby stuff. And the thing I’ve learned about stuff is that it is easier to not accumulate it than it is to try to get rid of it when you realize you don’t want the shit anymore.

If we ever have another baby, we are going to create his gear out of things we already have lying around the house. I could rig a swing out of a sheet, some rope and a spare cardboard box, a bouncy chair out of a couch cushion and a few elastics, and I could make a kickass exersaucer by cutting a few holes in a big Tupperware storage container from the basement and sticking rattles all over the top with electrical tape.

yoga as a contact sport

I’ve started working out again. I’m doing it slowly so I don’t end up feeling like my entire body is a bruised piece of fruit the next day. I usually take it too far when I get back into exercising after some time off.  I use too much weight, I do too many reps and then the next day I can’t walk or lift stuff or BREATHE without feeling every single muscle in my body screaming in protest.

I work in a gym, so it’s easy to work out. I usually do a few reps of a new exercise when I’m teaching it to someone for the first time because it’s easier to show than to tell. But instead of backing off after I show, I’ve started continuing on with the whole exercise right along with them, under the guise that we’re doing it together. Like gym buddies.

This has been working out great except for the days when I really want to do triceps and all I have are knee patients. Or I want to do quads and all day long I have shoulder appointments. So when it’s slow I do a few sets of tricep presses or hamstring curls, and since all the exercise is spread out through the day, I do more than I probably would if I went to the gym for a couple of hours.

But there’s the problem of working only part-time. I should be exercising more than three days a week, so I went into Tivo and searched around for an exercise show I can record and do every day.  I found Yoga Zone and it’s perfect because it is on every day at 6am. I can record it in the morning and then do it in the day whenever it’s convenient.  I never thought to consider that with a toddler in the house bouncing off the walls all day, no time is convenient for yoga.

I stupidly thought that Joey and I could do yoga together. But since the yoga instructors do not dress in colorful blue or red monster costumes to exercise, Joey is not interested in anything they’re saying or doing on the screen. He’s far more interested in what Mama’s doing on the floor all upside down and twisted like a pretzel, and he’d much rather use this time for fun things like banging books into my face while I’m trying to balance and control my breathing in downward dog, or throwing his cup at my knees while I’m trying to feel a connection with the earth during my sun salutations.

I tried to ignore his abuse and it was working until he pulled out his secret weapon. He took a big swig off his sippy cup, twirled himself around a few times and then walked over to me and SPIT UP MILK on my hand while I was in the middle of a slow pushup. The kid hasn’t spit up in almost a year so I know it was intentional.

It’s hard to ignore curdled milk as it drips through your fingers and onto the carpet so I put my yoga on hold until Eli came home. And once he was home I gave him very specific instructions: Keep this child away from me for ten minutes so I can finish doing yoga. I don’t know what Eli heard me say, but it only took three minutes before I saw him whispering into Joey’s ear and then Joey toddled over to me, got UNDER MY BODY while I was doing a front backbend pose called camel or cat or some other ridiculous animal, and started pulling my shirt up and sticking his fingers in my bellybutton. He made me lose my balance and fall down, and then he looked over at Eli with a big smile and clapped his hands while Eli shouted praise, “Good boy! You found mama’s button!”

I gave Eli my best I will murder you in your sleep later if you don’t make this stop death stare until he gathered Joey up and took him into the kitchen. Where he discovered that in all the excitement Joey had pooped his diaper. Since the wipes were in the living room, he brought Joey back in there and changed his diaper not even three feet away from where I was sitting in meditation pose with my eyes closed, legs crossed and my hands out to the sides resting on my knees trying to be at peace with the universe. It was a futile attempt because how can a person find their fucking center when it smells like you’re meditating in a bowel?

I know I should just pick up a copy of Sweatin’ to the Oldies and be done with it, because if there’s anything that will hold Joey’s attention on the screen it’s that tubby bitch Richard Simmons and his tribe of human physical agony.

saturday night fever

I’ve been slowly cleaning my house out this winter, getting rid of all the excess clutter. Normally when I do this, I hang on to stuff that I don’t want anymore because it’s too good to throw away. This is why I have two extra computer monitors, a spare television, and so much random baby shit like a beautiful vibrating papasan chair and a brand new crib tent that doesn’t fit the crib all collecting dust in the basement. But back in November I decided that I would have a yard sale in the spring and the promise of the sale is making me much choosier about what gets to stay in my home.

The sale needs to happen soon because we’re running out of basement. This morning I thought about opening an ebay store to get rid of everything, but that would be a lot of work, and might cut into my naps. Anyway, I’ve never had a huge yard sale before, so if you have and you’ve got some tips or tricks to share that may help me succeed at selling every damn thing in my basement, send them my way.

Moving on.

I don’t really have anything pressing to talk about. Eli and I have been going out more lately, and I can’t stress the importance of a reliable babysitter when you have young children. Joey goes to bed every night by 7pm, so Eli and I aren’t out together often in the evening. But lately we’ve been having our sitter come over on Saturday nights so we can go out and drink beer and socialize and live for a while like normal adults. And something happens to me when we drive away from the house in the dark, headed for a pub or a restaurant or even just over to a friend’s house for a party that I think is probably natural euphoria but feels like a damn good drug high.

Last Saturday night we hadn’t even traveled a mile from our house when we saw a fantastic wreck happen at an intersection involving many teenagers and their parents’ cars. It was mayhem, complete with screaming and crying and the road covered in broken glass. Once we got past that, we drove by a small car of more teenagers that had pulled over so one of them could puke on the side of the road. I almost forgot that the world is different on Saturday night. There’s so much happening out there while I’m sitting in my living room watching movies or playing strip uno with Eli at the kitchen table before calling it a night at 9.

When I know I’m going out on Saturday night, I make a pot of coffee in the afternoon so that I don’t get sleepy too early in the evening. My body is used to going to bed very early these days, but when we go out I like to stay out at least until midnight so it’s worth it and will sustain me for a couple of weeks before I get the itch again. I’m probably sounding a little negative about the necessary slow down that happens to a person’s social life when they have a baby. And I’m not. I wouldn’t trade the experience of being a mom and raising a child for anything in the world, but there has to be balance. It can’t be all Sesame Street and trips to the park. Sometimes mama needs to get her groove on.