Out of Body

I put on my usual chipper morning face.
The bearded cowboy on the tv says “Yew don’t recall ‘im? Or yew don’t wanna recall ‘im?”
Jeff has been up since whenever, as he does not have a circadian rhythm.
“What you watching?” I say. I’m friendly. It’s supposed to show.
“Um, actually it’s not a movie, it’s Gunsmoke,” says Jeff.
I didn’t ask if it was a movie.
“Can you tell I’m trying to be extra friendly to help you feel good?” I ask. In a friendly way.
“Oh,” says Jeff. “Ok.” He shuffles upstairs for today’s 6:15 am bedtime. Gunsmoke was evidently not all that compelling.
Becca and Olivia have actually woken to their alarms. Olivia makes only one reference to wanting to punch somebody, so I take her stress level to be low today. Becca breezes through, makes some toast and jam, has it all together. Her hair is floofed. She is Marilyn among the Munsters, with one exception: Sometimes she gets embarrassed by us.
Gabe, at my urging, staggers into the shower for a nap. After I bang on the door 5 or 6 times and say “wash your hair,” he stumbles out and scarfs some Honey Bunches of Oats. Then he squishes the dog into the corner of the couch. He is trying to occupy the same cubic footage as the dog. He is trying to defy the laws of physics and the dog knows it.
“I had an out of body experience in math yesterday,” says Gabe. Yesterday was the first day of school. It’s his last year in this school. Next year--high school. Of some sort. I’m not sure I want to be hearing about out of body experiences in math class.
“Do you think you could save out of body experiences for lunch or recess?” I ask. I’m silly. He tells me, and I already knew this, that you can’t control out of body experiences.

Good thing they can't fire me.

Two of Rachel’s friends from St. Mary’s stopped by here with her briefly yesterday, after a day in Annapolis. I don’t know why this kind of situation can make me feel so ill at ease--it’s related somehow to my domestic misfit syndrome.
One of the nice young ladies said “you have a lovely home.” Luckily, I knew the correct response and replied “thanks,” even though I was thinking something like this: Why would you say that to me? Do I look like the kind of person who would have a lovely home? Do I in any way resemble Martha Stewart? Is it not obvious that my rightful habitat would be a barn?

It’s probably good that I didn’t say those things. It might have confused them. They, after all, were following the script, and I was off on a wild tangential head trip. And I think I displayed ample awkwardness as the 3 of them (2 friends + Rachel) sat at the kitchen counter munching tortilla chips and hummus while I sauteed chard, Olivia made mac and cheese, Jeff pulled a Flatbread pizza out of the freezer, while I apologized for the fact that “we don’t really fix dinner here--we just kind of randomly eat stuff.

Gadzooks. Any reasonable mom of teens would be able to offer something on the spot. I think it didn’t matter. I think they’d eaten and snacked in town and weren’t really hankering for a mom-figure to lay out a repast.

And then they got ready to leave. The other nice young lady made a point of sticking her head in the kitchen to say “Thanks for having us.” I was thinking: Having you? I didn’t even do anything. I didn’t even get you a drink. (Luckily Rachel did!) You must have a real professional mother at your house who taught you what to say...which means--yikes! You know a bogus imposter when you see one! But I didn’t say that. I think I said something like “sure.”

I am Salieri.

I'm several chapters into book #3, and my confidence and resolve flag with distressing regularity. Is it the right project? Does it stink as much as everything leading up to it? Unanswerable questions. There's a faction that has suggested I stick to essays, but I don't have an essay project clinging tenaciously to my brain the way the story does. All signs, all portents, all the cosmic nods which I've so annoyingly requested have pointed to this ridiculous effort to channel Roald Dahl. Or something like that.

So I'm at it. Because to not be at it guarantees that my comfort with life will tank. Weird process. It's so easy to be distracted. Often, I would vastly rather squeak out a few tunes on the fiddle. And I wouldn't rather clean the bathroom, or see to it that there's food in the house, but those are necessities and hard to ignore.

Here are two categories of people whom I envy.
Category #1: J.K. Rowling
Category #2: Anyone who is engaged in a pursuit which keeps them calm and satisfied.

The thing is, I have never had an avocation for which I have received so many...as I've said--cosmic nods...as this book thing. I have also never wanted a job in the way that I want the writer job. Never ever. And I've wanted to want something. This is the only thing that's ever been right.

So I do feel--and this is kind of stupid, but I'm serious--I do feel that to continue charging at the gates of publishing success is one of my purposes for now. However, this conviction does not keep me from railing at the Cosmos for assigning me a task for which I feel completely inadequate. I mean, cripes, if I must feel compelled to write, at least send me a gifted muse. Instead, I got Clarence the crappy muse, and it's up to me to try to earn him his wings since he clearly is a muse in name only.

Thanks HAL.

So today we did it. Both our local McD's have recently sprouted red kiosks on their fronts, and today we rented "Ice Princess" from the Redbox DVD automated rental station. Seems a decent deal at a buck a night, and is a pretty slick process if you can overlook that you have to touch a screen all sullied by deep-fry grease fingerprints. It's basically a big atm that spits out your selection in a tougher than average case, and will, theoretically, suck it back up tomorrow. Ah, the joys of automation.

baseline middling

There's something I've noticed. And I'll comment on it because of a couple things--One is that there's at least one person who finds my musings dismayingly negative. The other thing is an observation made by Rachel. She asked whether I used to enjoy the process of getting several small children ready for and into bed. (She was asking, I think, to compare her feelings about babysitting smalls--mainly positive feelings-- to how it was for me.)
I responded that I "kind of liked it. " She then correctly observed that for me to make that statement was the equivalent of her saying "I really, really love it!"
And I think it's true that I am given to understatement, even when I find something gratifying. The flip side of the 45 is that if my tone seems to be hovering a bit below neutral, this is unlikely to be indicative of serious negativity. Or at least not anything I'm wallowing in. Don't like wallowing. Maybe I can relate to Lou Grant when he told Mary that her first try at producing the news herself "didn't stink." Mary, of course, knew this was high praise and took it as such.
Anyway, go here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/peachkabob/ if you've an appetite for effusive enthusiasm. It is fortunate that curmudgeonliness is not always inherited!
(I'll get back to that thing about meaningfulness soon...)

You Don't Pick

There are people in my life.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Sometimes I would have the people be another way. Or at least I think I would. Maybe.

Here’s one: This guy can annoy. I would say that he does it without half trying but I think he often does try, and more than half. Probably 3/4 or better. You cannot tell him anything. You are wrong, I’ll just let you in on that right off the bat. If you are silly, you can try to tell him that he probably can’t build a robot out of random parts he’s extracted from what used to be a functional clock radio and a broken telephone. You can try to tell him that it would take years of studying before he’d even know where to start, but, as I’ve already informed you--you’re wrong. At the moment I’m trying to get this guy to write a good paragraph on the conflicts found in the storyline of The Golden Compass. He is on refreshing break number 10.

(edited out a part here. Just because. There are things you should say, and things maybe you shouldn't say. ) I had a little online tarot reading recently, that spoke to [the edited out thing] with unexpected clarity. A great deal more clarity than my memory, in fact, but it said something like this:

I had 10 jars, all full. I’m not sure what they were full of but it was something good--it was the essence of goodness. Several spilled. Dumped. Gone. I have maybe five or six left. The reading went on to advise that I make the most of the remaining jars as opposed to going all cranky about how I used to have 10.
Anyway, if I want to personally extend the metaphor, I’d say that I have quite a few other types of vessels as well, in addition to those jars. I’ve got some amphoras, several pitchers, a number of coffee cups, and quite a bit of tupperware as well. All the more reason not to make life a shrine to the spilled jars.

So, I said I would have people be another way. But then I’d have to be able to suggest an alternate storyline. Which means it would be boring, and most likely trite. Which is another subject.
(next: My damnable need to have a meaningful life, as defined by my personal, inadequate comprehension of meaningfulness.)