Vermicious Knids

What with the end of the year coming and all, I started putting a little thought into New Year's Resolutions. I hesitate to make any resolutions for 2011, mainly because in the past it seems that when I'm unable to keep said resolutions for whateve reason, it usually comes with a harsh life lesson about setting your expectations too high or thinking too much of yourself.

2009 seemed to be the worst in terms of that. My resolution initially was to pay off our credit card and buy a house and obviously lose 20 pounds. By the 15th of January I was unemployed and watching Aretha Franklin's inagural hat domiate the nation in a daze wondering what had happened to my career. By the end of September I was employed again, but also tangled up in a web of indefinite temporary-to-hire work that I'm still in. We still don't have a house. The credit card was paid off, but is sadly no more so.

2010 was a little better. I resolved to keep my indefinite temp-to-hire job and to obviously lose 20 pounds. I did keep my temp-to-hire job, and I did lose (almost) 20 pounds by May. Unfortunately they've come back, and brought some friends. Some people say it's stress. I think I'm just getting ready to go through a cycle of mitosis that, when complete, will finally give the world what it needs: two of me.

I could say that in 2011 I'm going to obviously lose the 20 pounds again and keep it off. I could say that I'm going to keep our apartment the picture of order, comfort, warmth, and welcome no thanks to my Martha Stewart Living subscription. I could say that yes, I will iron every week and water the plants biweekly and cut cupons on a Friday night, read brittle classic literature, and that I will complete all tasks assigned to me at work with a degree of perfection not seen since St. Martha of the Linens herself was born. I get the feeling that if I do that by mid-March I'll wind up under the coffee table surrounded in Hot Pocket sleeves and backissues of Cosmo watching SciFi Original Movies that all star the Lesser Baldwins.

Maybe keeping it simple is key. Alright. For 2011, I resolve to not travel via glass elevators. Very little good ever comes of that.

Redum and Wassail

Before you read too far you should know that this is just an attempt to get my writing wheels flowing again. There was a time when I would write every day, sometimes several times. I'm trying to get back in the habit and it is not like riding a bike. You can forget how to really write.

On Christmas Eve I was on the couch thinking about the Christmases my husband and I have said since were married...all 3 of them to date, and I realized we're lacking in traditions. Severely. I had several growing up - the tree(s) would go up the day after Thanksgiving, St. Nick would visit a few times during Advent. When I was young, my mom would attack my head with hot rollers while I protested (usually loudly), we'd truck off to Christmas Eve mass with my hair still hurting, and then we'd come home to dinner. For some reason, I keep thinking it was usually something Italian. Either way, after we ate we were allowed to open one gift. One. Uno. The rest would have to wait until the next day. When Christmas Day proper came, it wasn't a free for all of paper and ribbons. The presents would be arranged according to who they went to, a process that was re-done several times over Advent and always done by yours truly, and then we'd always start with the youngest. Christmas always went off without a hitch, due in no small part to my mom's planning skills which, apparently, are not necessarily inherited.

The last few Christmases have acted like the topiaries in The Shining - they get closer when you're not looking and then before you know it your face is being gnawed off by an evergreen rabbit and surprise! it's Christmas. And there's possibly a crazy guy coming after you with a roque mallet.

In other news, I feel like I should give my husband a medal for not chucking me out the door the past few weeks. I've just felt mean. Snappish, short-tempered, what have you. It's completely unacceptable. The project I was involved with at work is done, I'm getting back into a regular routine, and all should be well. I just feel on edge and don't know how to relax. Anyway, Husband Dearest, if you read this, I <3.

Did I mention we ran over Prancer one year on Christmas Eve one year? Well, 'Prancer' at any rate. That may be a story for another time but it could be one heck of a tradition. Anyway, it's 8:15 pm, and I am being old and taking myself to bed.

Clean

I'm on an anti-depressant and have been since February of this past year. I'd been toying with the idea of bringing up depression to my doctor for a long time, but there were 2 events that really flipped the switch from 'Idle' to 'Go'. The first was that my dearest friend told me I seemed weathered, touchy. We don't 'see' each other every day, or every week, but we communicate on a daily basis and if my moodiness and general sourness was evident even through email, something was wrong. The second was when I burst into tears in the middle of a car dealership. Granted, I had been there for 4 hours for what was supposed to be a routine oil change when a service guy came out and said my oil plug had been stripped and it would be $400-something to replace it. That was quickly followed up by me discovering I'd lost my debit card. Normal people can take something like that in stride. I, on the other hand, crumbled into a shiny wet mess which scared the service guy into loaning me a car while we worked something out financially.

My friends know I'm on medication. My mother knows. I don't think anyone else in my family does and I don't know how I feel about that although the fact this is going in a public blog will probably negate that little problem. There's a vein of belief that mood stablizers, anti-depressants, what have you, are cop-outs. Tough it up. Be a (wo)man about it. Let go and let God. I understand that. Honestly. I tried letting go and letting God but is it impossible to think that this was His way of telling me that it's ok to be human and ask for help?

When I did talk to my doctor, she told me something surprising: sometimes a good change can trigger depression. In my case, it was getting married. Don't get me wrong - I am happier beyond words with my husband, with our life together. If I could go back and change anything I wouldn't; not one iota. But it was a big change, going from living on my own to having this whole new entity around all the time. It was a big change, but a good one. It was also quickly followed up by getting laid off, being placed in a temporary (but seemingly eternal) job situation that was also nearly ended abruptly, and an unexpected passing last Christmas. It's apparently enough to nudge anyone.

The reason this is on my mind now is that I'm scared the meds have stopped working. I feel myself falling into the same thought patterns and practices that I had before, feeling the same feelings and it scares me. My doctor was hesitant to wean me off the pills in the winter, as she said most people feel more depressed in the darker winter months anyway. It's fine that she was hesitant; I was outright petrified to stop them. We're going to see how things are in the spring.

There, that wasn't so hard to say now, was it.

Truthily

I don't know if it's the sudden deluge of family time I've had lately, or the fact that I'm rapidly sliding towards my dreaded late-twenties, but I've been thinking a lot about kids.

I don't like them. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, really. I've said it before. Unless I'm related to them, I do not care for children. They're loud, they smell wierd, excrete unspeakable things, you can't even try to reason with them, they hardly do what they're told, and they have trains of thought that are just mind-boggling. They're completely foreign to me, and always have been. But it seems like everywhere I turn, they're popping out left right and center.

There hasn't necessarily been a lot of pressure to have one from the family, which is nice, but it also means that whatever pressure is there exists more in my head than anything. Really, brain? You're really going to add this to the seemingly endless list of 'To-dos' plodding around up there? Where exactly should 'Kids' be listed? Before or after 'Buying a bedroom set that A) matches and B) isn't made of compressed woodchips'? Before or after 'Plump up the savings account for a house we'll never get a mortgage for'? Before or after 'Drop that last 10 20 30 pounds so I'll stop feeling like a beached landwhale every time I leave the apartment'? Is it really a good idea to bring an entirely separate entity that would completely depend on my deplorable parenting skills?

Then there's the other side. There's a large community of 'Mommy bloggers' out there who document the everyday trials and joys of having children. I'll admit to having read them, and while it shows the (sometimes very) bad with the good, part of my brain just keeps saying 'Well, if it were you it'd be different. It wouldn't be hard at all'. That part of my brain is about to get lobotomized with a grapefruit spoon, if I'm going to be truthy here. It's the part that starts showing me pictures of the perfect house where somehow, we've managed to work it so I can be a stay-at-home mom to perfectly behaved children that have nevertheless inhereted my vocabulary and my husband's tongue, who get straight A's and are popular without being Popular (there's a difference there, y'know.) That just couldn't happen. Or wouldn't.

I don't know what's right or not. Is it selfish to not want to hop on the baby wagon? Is it selfish to want to wait until we could give them everything they deserve?

Loss

It was raining when I was 13, much like it is today. It was the kind of rain where yeah, it messed up our hair and made walking to the bus station dismal but we were so glad it wasn't snow we didn't care. The first thing that would ring odd with me (later though; always later) was that the vice-principal came to our usual lunch table and asked us all our names. He told us it was for a survey.

After lunch they took our grade down to the library. We thought ti was to kick off our month-long research project on Australia. A filmstrip or something like that. The principal was there and I remember he was either crying or trying not to cry. He told us after a few minutes what had happened; that my best friend and our classmate was gone. I don't remember what else he said because I don't think I heard it. I don't remember a lot of the rest of the day, except calling my mom at work and almost not being able to tell her, getting a ride home, and trying to distract myself by looking over the program from the play I'd gone with my mom to see the night before. I wanted to watch the news but my dad turned it off and said he didn't think I'd really want to see what they were showing. He was probably right. I tried to eat dinner, just rice, but couldn't get past the first bite. To this day I can't put into words what was in my head that day, or for many days after except the fact that I wanted to call her and tell her everything that'd happened. I remembered her phone number all the way through high school. I remember the sound of her voice. I just wish I could remember the last thing she said to me.

A few weeks back my dad and I were discussing the possibility of needing a funeral home for a family member. It was premature, as it turns out, but he said thinking about it was bringing back what happened to her very clearly. I wanted to tell him it never went away.

Eloquence

This past Sunday I was watching Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel not because I hold any particular belief in the paranormal, but because the three 'investigators' are so completely ridiculous I can't believe they ever figured out how to put their pants on in the morning, much less get their own cable show. Each episode can be summed up thusly:

[Scene]

The setting: some totally rad-awesome place where Something Bad may have happened anywhere from the dawn of time up to last year. Usually an abandoned warehouse, extra-dusty, an abandoned sanitarium/hospital, a mid-renovation hotel, or a bar. Our 3 Dudes arrive and set up camp.

Dude 1: DUDE. Bro.

Dude 2: Brah?

Dude 3: Like, dude.

Dude 1: Dude. Duuuuuuuudebrah. Look at me yell at ghosts. [note: The last line will come out as 'Bro dude dude $(#% brah']

Dudes 2&3: Brooooo.

Dustbunny: Rah.

Dudes 1-3: WAAAAUUUUGGGGH DUDE BRO BRO DUDE BRAH $%! BRAAAH DUUUDE!!!! [They run in terror to either a like-minded paranormal investigation team or a priest. The like-minded paranormal investigation team will inevitably tell them at the the drafts, dust bunnies, and their own shadows are like, totally for sure ghosts. Dude. The priest will sigh and tell them to go back to Bakersfield and see if they can get their jobs at Pac Sun back.]

Dude 1: Bro. Dude.

[SCENE]

Sad as it is, it's still better than American Idol or Kate Gosselin's dancing. Combined.

Acrobatics

One of the first things my husband and I did after we returned from our honeymoon (our first joint purchase, for future note) was to buy a bookcase for our living room. He loves putting things together; I love pretending our living room is about to be showcased in Better Homes & Gardens, so what better way to spend a Saturday than to go down to Target as moony-eyed newleyweds and make a our third joint purchase: A 7-foot-tall espresso-colored pressed fiberboard bookshelf that would look entirely too large in our living room? It seemed like a great idea, until we got it into the parking lot and to our second joint purchase: my husband's car. Chalk it up to the naivete of youth or just poor foresight, but cramming this 7-foot-tall espresso-colored pressed fiberboard bookshelf into a Mazda 3 with two full-grown adults was going to prove to be something of a Tetris championship of spacial management. We did it though. We popped open the trunk, laid down the back seat, wiggled the yet-to-be-assembled bookshelf in, and scooted the passenger seat up until we could close aforementioned trunk.

The only problem with this was that there was an occupant in the passenger seat: me. I am not short, nor am I particularly flexible, but I was determined to have this too-large bookshelf in our living room by noon, so help me God. By the time all was said and done, all the doors closed (mostly), the trunk closed (mostly), and I got to spend the mercifully short 8-10 mile drive home with my face mashed against the windshield hoping that we didn't run into any state troopers because if I'd have tried to put on my seatbelt I would've strangled myself. Of course, if we'd been hit nothing in that car would've moved. At all.

My point in saying all this is this: we're revamping our efforts to swap out some older, worn hand-me-down furniture and we still don't have a car capable of transporting it. I drive a Corolla that so far, knock on wood, has not tried to kill me by random acceleration. My husband's still got his Mazda. All I can hear right now is my parents telling me that we should really get a car that we can transport stuff in so there's really no need to say 'I told you so!' Mom and/or Dad. My car is recently paid off and I'm trying to think ahead as to what I'd like to replace it with Someday. Someday, by the way, gets a capital S because we've got a lot hedging on it. We're going to get a house Someday, we're going to have kids Someday, I'm going to remember that I don't like raddishes before I eat one Someday, but I digress. What's good out there in terms of a mid-sized car or smaller SUV? I don't need a Land Rover or tank (although that would certainly take the headache out of my commute), just something I can Someday put a headboard and new dresser in.

Airing out

I love order. I love organizing, cleaning, putting piles of things away, and right angles. Hardcore love on the right angles. From looking around my home right now, though, it'd be hard to see that. There are dishes on the counter, in the sink, the kitchen floor needs to be swept, and I won't even begin to describe the chaos that is the fridge, pantry, or state of our bedding. It's ok though, because what I love most about order, organizing, and cleaning is blitzing our house (apartment, really. But I call it a house sometimes. Freudian slip.). There's something about going rather haywire on a mess that eases tension and makes me feel copacetic.


If I had a therapist they would probably say I like to do that because it's something I have complete control over. I can't control the state of my job. I can't control the traffic on my commute into the city, or the fact that I have not and will not get a raise at work. I can't control the economy, or the weather (yet), or other peoples' minds (again, yet). So I clean.

And it makes things a little easier.