New Year’s Resolutions 2013

1.  Rather than try to lose 10 pounds (which, let’s face it, will probably not happen) I will try to lose 10        wrinkles. 

2.  Share my innermost thoughts with as many people as possible, including total strangers.

3.  Have a mad, passionate affair with the guy from the current Calvin Klein underwear ad.

4.  Think less and act more.  Or just think less.  Or just have a transfrontal lobotomy.

5.  Learn to speak Italian.  Or French.  Or Spanish.  (I’m really conflicted about learning a foreign language, but I do want to have illicit affairs with hot foreigners, so I have to start somewhere.)

a.  Amendment to #5:  Maybe it’s better if we don’t speak the same language, so I can just listen to the hot accent and not care what he’s saying.

6.  Do yoga rather than just thinking about doing yoga. 

7.  Watch every documentary available on Netflix.

a.  Make my own documentary about something totally irrelevant, like Pringles

8.  Live up to the example provided by my role model, Hunter S. Thompson.

9.  Get a PhD.  (Like buy one, not actually do all the work.)

10.  Move.  (Seriously, I have got to get the fuck out of here.)

11.  Write the great American novel.  (Or just finish anything I start, including my laundry.)

12.  Stop more often to smell the roses.  (And since my rose bushes are dead, I pledge to dig up other people’s smelly roses and bring them home.)

13.  Become the new John Hughes.

14.  Look as hot in a bikini as Phoebe Cates did in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  (as if)

15.  Travel to a foreign country (preferably not as human chattel).

16.  Let go, and let God.  (Just kidding, I’m going to let Allah in this time.)

17.  Make more big, empty promises.

Guilt Sucks

Fucking Catholic guilt.  They must have really sunk their hooks deep when I was a child, because I can’t believe how effectively guilt makes life suck.  The thing is, not everyone reacts the same way to guilt.  Some people seem to actually be completely devoid of it.  HOW?!   I would pay any amount of money to reconfigure my brain so that I didn’t have to be eaten alive by the vicious expectations of other people.  I don’t want to give a shit about what other people think.  I just don’t know how.

Example #1:  My parents.  My mother is fond of saying that she doesn’t TRY to make me feel guilty, but if I DO … well, there must be a reason.  Really, mom?  Well played, lady.  All my parents have to do is sit in their house over there in Omaha and breathe, and I start to feel guilty about not going over there more often. 

 

Example #2:  Not even MY parent – my in-law parent.  I didn’t go to her extended family Christmas fete on Christmas day (we had just celebrated with her two days prior with dinner and drinks and gifts) so she sent me a note in the mail saying that the gift was “to be opened at her family’s Christmas!”  Are you kidding?!  Forgive me for wanting to be indulgent in my pajamas with my children on Christmas!  And since when are gifts conditional?

Example #3:  My brother is a piece of work.  I don’t like him.  I am made to feel guilty by just about everyone for not liking him and not tolerating his bullshit all the time.  I don’t understand why people think that just because two people are blood-related they should share some deep bond.  Some family is just people you happen to be forced into social interaction with more often than others.  That doesn’t necessarily mean I like them.   (Such sentiment, of course, makes me a bitch)

Example #4:  People who don’t understand what the word INTROVERT means try to make me feel guilty for not wanting to be a social butterfly.  I suck at small talk.  I don’t want to do it.  I don’t want to entertain people or try to keep up repartee about the weather under any circumstances.  It’s exhausting to those of us who aren’t chatty beings. 

Example #5:  I can’t even be a proper drunk.  I’d like to just go off the deep end like Hunter Thompson or Ernest Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald (or even Zelda Fitzgerald) or Dylan Thomas, but the guilt gets to me every time!  I feel bad for drinking too much and then try to repent.  Stupid.  Maybe I should have gotten myself a crippling heroin addiction years ago when I had the strength.  Too late now. 

There are dozens of other examples, but it’s kind of just pissing me off when I write them down, so I’m going to navigate away and work on my screen play for a while.  (Another source of guilt, because I always feel like I should be doing something academic rather than whatever else I’m doing.)  Good job, Catholic priests and educators.  I can see how you managed to rule the world for a short period of time.  

Happy Christmas. 12/25/12

So this is Christmas.  What have you done?  Another year older.   Another just begun  …   

I have the following things:

·         a house in a safe, suburban neighborhood

·         food, clean water, and a war-free zone

·         an extended family who loves me

·         beautiful, intelligent children

·         a roaring fire in my fireplace

·         a new, $300 Bose Soundlink wireless ipod dock with thousands of songs to choose from

·         a brand new Keurig coffee maker that rocks out amazing brews at the push of a button

I do NOT have the following things:

• ·         a healthy marriage
• ·         a partner to spend my days with
• ·         friends with whom to share my life
• ·         children who respect each other
• ·         a life-location which suits my needs
• ·         freedom to walk away from any of the above problems

And so, I wonder on this lovely (and brutally cold) Christmas day, if this is as good as it gets.  I wonder every day, all the time if I should just suck it up and (like shitty medicine) take this life as it is, or if I should bail.  I really, honestly don’t know.  But I’m going to share a secret with you:  there’s only so much time in this life, and spending it alone is pretty terrible.  Being lonely and alone is deeply unsatisfying and difficult.  And I don’t know how to fix it.  Being with other people makes me exhausted, because I always feel like they just want something from me.  I want to have a friend who will come around and just hold my hand and watch movies with me.  No talking.  No expectations.  And then maybe we can make some nachos or something and go from there.  I’m so sad all the time, and I am fucking sick of it.  I don’t want to be sad – it’s tragic and boring and stupid.  I should be above such common stupidity.  And yet here I am … listening to Eddie Vedder do something relevant (make music and change people’s lives) while I sit in my chair in my basement talking to a computer screen.

How much difference does any of this make?  None?  Because my life has stalled.  Full stop.  

Druid Pagan Jesus Allah celebration

I would like to briefly rant about Christmas, Hanukkah, Druid Pagan Solstice, Kwanzaa and Ramadan.

What the fuck?

I spend an inordinate amount of time carefully choosing presents for the people I love, but my catholic guilt makes me feel bad for not buying secondary people presents, not buying some people enough presents, and not being in the properly festive mood.  Can someone PLEASE tell me how to get back to the Charlie Brown spirit of Christmas where I belong?  I hate to admit that the catholic elementary school taught me to properly sing carols and play Christmas music on the piano and make holiday crafts, whereas my agnosticism makes it largely impossible to get in the spirit.  I don't need either the Jesus birth scenario nor the ho-ho-ho bullshit - I just want to hug it out with the druid solstice.  I can't even manage to do that!  I don't feel like it is Christmas!!  How do I get there?!

I bought a bunch of cool shit for my kids, but my husband and I decided not to buy each other gifts, since we are a fucking sham of a couple.  This essentially means that I will not be receiving Christmas gifts from someone who loves me.  ( I realize my children love me, but I fund their purchases, which takes away from the generosity and foresight of a properly thought-out gift.)  I swear to god, my students have done a better job reading me than my husband will, because he's never home and has no sense of romanticism in his body.

Breaking point.  How can I love something so much and not be paired with a person/people who have no regard for what makes me happy?  I've done something terribly wrong, I think.

Newtown, CT: Life is Dangerous

28 people dead.  20 of them children.

I have said since year one of my current teaching assignment that I can picture the school shooting that might happen in my building.  I can see the stairwell where the shooter would start.  I can imagine how easy it would be to get a gun (or several) into the school.  I can even play the scenario out in my head in a hundred different ways.  Why?  Because I live in America, where the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States proclaims that we need an armed militia to protect ourselves against the potential threat of an out-of-control government.  And in the meantime, Americans use their ready access to guns to kill other, unarmed Americans.  Children.  Little kids who just went to kindergarten today to learn about words and numbers.  What kind of devolution of humanity is going on in the world?

My 11-year-old daughter went to school today and had a great day.  She graduated from D.A.R.E., met the mayor and the chief of police, listened to other kids proclaim their devotion to a drug-free life (however deluded that might be...).  She played in her first-ever band concert, with a solo on the bells.  She celebrated with her friends in various ways all day.  What she did NOT do was get shot.  Some crazy, fucking lunatic did NOT come into her school and shoot 20 of her friends, the principal, a counselor, and six other people.

How does any student, any teacher, any parent prepare themselves for such insanity?

They don't.

When the shooter comes in the building, I'm sure he or she (statistically, it's a he) is remarkably calm.  He has the guns, the ammunition, the weapons secured under a coat or a hoodie or in a bag.  He goes to the place where the most harm has been done to him or where he can do the most harm, and he retaliates for whatever harm he perceives has been done to him.  Innocent people die.  Well-intentioned people die.  People who have devoted their lives in the service of others die.  Children, who have yet to devote their lives to anything, die.  And for what?

If you have kids, hug them.  If you have parents, call them.  If you love anyone, let them know.  Because the bastards are out there, and they're armed with government-protected weapons to fucking mow us down when we least expect it.  Any generic 20-year-old man in America has some of the most ample opportunities of any person, any place in the entire world, and this particular person decided to take that social advantage and butcher a bunch of six-year-olds.  Ridiculous.  I'm glad he killed himself; I just wish he would have started with himself and left everyone else alone.

It's a travesty when people can't go to school or go to a movie without having the fear of a mentally ill psychopath shooting indiscriminately into the crowd.  Get your shit together, America.  Guns are being used to murder other people in this country ... a lot.  Are we Los Estados Mexicanos or Les Estados Unidos?

This (like Columbine and V. Tech, et al) makes me physically ill.

Puppies

I was kind of bummed out yesterday, so I took the advice of two of my students and went to play with puppies.  I convinced my son to go with me, looked up the place they told me about on my iphone, and headed off for some puppy lovin'.

My students had told me about their trip to the kennels, so I was excited.  I want to buy a dog, but I have no money, plus I'm not sure if I'm ready for all the hair and smells and shit in the backyard and whatnot.  So I decided to just go play for fun and I set off on an adventure.

To a fucking puppy mill.  God damn it!  What a depressing, horrible place!!  I wanted to take every single one of those puppies and throw them in my car and just randomly distribute them to families in suburbia.  I seriously almost shoved a little Rottweiler in my purse, because it was the cutest thing I've seen in a long time.  Here's the thing:  when the guy took the puppy out of the cage and put her on the linoleum floor, she couldn't stand up.  When I asked the guy what the hell was wrong with the dog, he said that she had never been on the floor before.  Seriously?!  Her cute huge puppy claws have only been on the cage floor?!  I just grabbed the puppy and snuggled it for like a half hour.   Look at it... how could you resist such a face?  The soulful little eyes are begging me to take her away.  (or maybe she just wanted to go back with her brothers and sisters - I'll never know)

I guess since it's Christmas-time, people will go in and buy these dogs, thus perpetuating the puppy mill.  They're cute, after all, and people want cute gifts during the holidays, even if those gifts were ripped away from their mothers much too early.