I know some of y'all don't go to Facebook, so I figured I'd make an offer for invites over here first where that might not happen as much. Also: facebook is calling youuuuu!!!

Also, hi! Crap but I'm busy this semester! I hope to someday write something substantial again...

 the happiest of returns. May this year bring you lots of joy and prosperity. And also a few more visits with me!  xox

 I can't think of anything clever to use for a google voice number. The best I got is (775) MAYA MAE. Anybody got ideas? Nothing that makes me sound too much like I think I'm Paris Hilton, please.

Thanks all you wonderful friends for your supportive comments. I feel rather less ragey today, and 1000 times more accepted. You all rock.

For our neighbor's ex, the handyman, we're going to try a somewhat unorthodox method and treat him like we would C, with kind but firm boundaries, rather than bawling him out or siccing a lawyer on him yet. He's basically a good guy and a people pleaser and I think we can get the work out of him if we play him right. Being lied to just sets me off so deeply that I wanted to strike him with lightning yesterday.

I'm feeling much more compassionate today.

Also, C's Summer Stage group put on their production of Willy Wonka last night - it was awesome! They did a great job & I think it was really good for C to be around kids a lot more talented that she is. Always being a big fish in a tiny pond is not so good for growth. This was a big, talented lake & she swam nicely in the crowd & had a good time in the chorus. I'm proud.

Also, she's beginning to get a glimmer of ambition regarding school again. The idea that if she does well enough she can go to college anywhere in the world that she wants was more motivating than I anticipated. Evidently she's not exactly planning to stick around the Jerz when she's grown up either.

 Been pretty quiet lately because I've been struggling with being unpleasant. There are so many people I know (especially on Facebook) who have this wonderfully positive facade like all the time, and it's so hard to counter "the universe is full of warm, pink supportive light" with "fuck it" and not feel like you're a negative ass.

( In which I am a negative ass, but tell you a little about what I've been up to: )

So you can see why I haven't had much to say lately. But I promised a birthday update for a dear far-flung friend, so there you go (happy 50th, sweetie).

I'll try to end it on a positive note. Things I'm grateful for:
It's been a delightfully cool and pleasant summer for the most part.
The flowers in my front yard are lovely.
I got to see Karen for a whole week only a month ago.
Our new windows open very easily.
Cat pee comes right out of microfiber.
I've had a nice long break from school in which I've gotten to do much recreational reading, and now I'm looking forward to going back.
My voice is turning a corner.
Softball season is over.
C might go stay with grandparents for 3 whole weeks!
My husband is so caring and supportive and tolerating of my crankiness.
We're going to Assateague next weekend.
All my wonderful friends.

For those of you who care to peruse the thousand or so pictures from Karen's wedding, they're nicely divided into categories and actually pretty easy to get through as long as you look at the thumbnails and zoom in on the ones you're curious about, rather than doing the slideshow.  Andie did an awesome job - her pictures of the food & kids are just as captivating as the wedding itself.

There are only a few of me & most of them involve a weird expression. But they document my being there, so I'm fine with it.

Some people *cough* Sheldon*cough* have been giving me a lot of crap about not posting here enough & since I proooomised from my vacaaaaation that I would dooooo this, here it is (happy birthday, motherfucker!):

( The Flight Out )

Karen and I leaped pretty quickly into laughing and catching up and wedding prep. The next few days were a whirlwind of folding and washing and cutting and finding last minute whatnots.

( The Wedding Saga )
( My Other PDX Friends )

( The Flight Back )

We landed in Philly at about 12:30AM and I could feel the east coast descend upon my chest. I can't quite describe it, but being out there with those guys just made me more me, and I feel myself slipping away a little more every day, like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon. It'll probably be a couple years till I get back, & I'll probably be sort of sad and lonely when I make it there again. But C will be grown in just six years, which means I'll only have to visit a few more times before I'm loading my stuff on a truck and finally moving where I belong, 15 years after I meant to go there. I can make it just fine. I have J, I have you awesome people I at least get to see at PDF, I have my new Red Tent friends, I have the internet, and the last six years went by in a blink, so there's no reason the next six wouldn't.

So, Sheldon, happy now? ;)

 

Today we will be going meet with the Vice Principal & C's math/spelling teacher regarding a day last week in which she was given five detentions for talking in class during a clay project (not direct instruction time).  This teacher has singled out C all year, but being called out for talking inappropriately is reasonable imho, even if you're the only talker in the group taking the consequences (not ideal, but not meeting time) so I've stayed out of it. However, five in a day, in a class you spend less than half the day in?!? Five that were administered as "do you want another detention?" not as, "you failed to follow this particular rule and the particular consequences for that is this so that is what is happening". AND she gets extra detentions for questioning the fairness of the situation. They call that, for some completely asinine reason, insubordination, which is pretty much where I get off the bus. The correct response to "what did I do?" should never EVER be "YOU know perfectly well!" And from what I understand, a student should be removed from class for disrupting it LONG before it comes around to five detentions. Hell, C would much rather have been sent to the office - I think she even asked to be! But in my opinion this teacher takes her frustrations out on her students. Other classmates aren't allowed to even acknowledge the presence of a student who is in trouble! WTF?

Sheesh. They're 12! They're going to act like 12 year olds! Why even teach 6th graders if you don't like them?

Still, I'm SO nervous about it. I plan to let her dad do most of the talking so I don't say anything stupid.

No boss, I actually don't like doing graphic design projects for your stupid personal crap for the money you pay me. No matter how cheerful you are when you call, it won't actually make me any more excited. What it actually does is make me want to reach through the phone and choke you.

 Never have problems sleeping, but I sure did last night! I'm thinkin' that gigantor decaf iced coffee wasn't so decaf. Wawa has a bad habit of mixing up their carafes & often you're playing russian roulette with your caffeine intake there. So I finally dozed off somewhere toward 2:30 this morning. Today I'm so epically tired I can barely type. You can't imagine how much backspacing was required to write this paragraph.

And yet I march onward...

This weekend was a giant marathon of house crap. Though I must admit I'm learning to love house crap. Sort of. There was also weeding and porch sittting and copious amounts of shirking in the nice, cool basement playing old computer games via gametap (currently: Myst Exile), and also some damn good PMS nookie. But mostly we're still prepping the dining room for painting - there's been 2 rounds of spackling and sanding, and then hand sanding the very fluted chair rail and crown molding, followed by the purchase of expensive lead filtering masks and the sealing off of the dining room in order to sand the baseboard & window trim that has lead under about 3 coats of latex, but is chipped away & exposed in places. Filter mask + 95 degree day = buckets of sweat. And today I feel every single minute that I didn't wear a particle mask for sanding plaster because it was too hot. My lungs are totally percolating gooey plaster. And somehow, the dining room looks exactly the way it did on Friday.

Except that now all we have to do is wash the walls and start priming. The room should be all back in place by Sunday night!

...and then we can load the living room into that room and start ALL over again! Wheeeeeee!!!

Okay, too tired for public consumption. I don't even know if what I'm writing is coherent. Get off work in 3 hours. If I can survive the 30 minute drive home, I'll be free to nap my way back to sanity.

Just keep bumping up against this struggle over being a beginner. It keeps me from doing all sorts of things I'd love to be able to do. I don't know if it's because I don't really believe I can learn, or I don't think I'm coordinated, or what, but I just struggle endlessly with anything physical. Give me something to read and I'll remember it forever, and I'll research it and probably come up with an original paper on it. But physical? Pfft.

At this point I can't really imagine finishing music ed, because I don't know how the hell I'll ever learn the piano. I have a friggin baby grand in my livingroom and a really good pianist in my bed, fer chrissakes, but I've never made it past lesson 1. I've never been any good at practicing. I didn't practice viola when I was 8, I don't really practice voice now, etc. It's really frustrating & not something I've ever been able to budge. So I keep thinking maybe I'll just teach history.

Meanwhile, I'm trying again to lose this extra 25 pounds. Calorie counting's going okay, but I no longer belong to a gym, so doing things to get in shape isn't so easy anymore. And I'm discovering just how too small for yoga my house is (1930 is not known for it's spacious rooms)... But so I've started hooping for at least 10 minutes every day. I figure it's manageable and I've sort of got to improve just doing it 10 minutes a day, so I figure it's a good place to learn to be bad at something. So I do, and I watch tutorials, and they make it look so easy...and then I just can't do it! Gah!

So after a solid week I can keep the hoop up at my chest for a few seconds, but I can't transition between my waist and my chest, and I can't move my arms around, and I can't do it on my shoulders at all... and I'm keeping at it because it beats the stairmaster, but It's really pushing all my "my body is broken" buttons. Other people seem to do this so naturally - what's wrong with me? Why am I so stiff and wooden?

Dealing with this new form of healthcare hell makes me very, very cross. I see exactly why McCain et al proposed this as an option for insuring everyone: it doesn't actually.

So taking my medications which make me function becomes a financial decision rather than a well-being one.

fuckers.

GRRRRRRRR. 

We're refinancing, which means that the Bank is sending over an appraiser Friday to make sure we haven't let the house go to shit and that it's still worth enough to keep us within the desired ratio despite the downward spiral of home values (which thankfully isn't hitting our neighborhood near as bad thanks to it being undesirable). Of course everything's taken apart so we can paint the dining room, so there's no way the house will look like anything other than a disaster. And part of the reason we're refinancing is to free up some liquid cash to do some improvements on places where the house isn't doing so well, like the soffits and the gutters and a flashing leak on the roof and the condition of the garage, etc. So now I'm worried: will we ironically get turned down for a refi for the exact things we're trying to refi to fix?

Commence hand wringing.

Exposure, cash money, and the chance to make a lasting phallic icon: http://www.thehugoawards.org/?page_id=275

 Just got switched from the awesomest PPO in the universe to an HSA, which is so confusing I don't even know how to use it except that I now pay for everything out of pocket until suddenly I don't. I'm on a couple of expensive meds and am due for a new CPAP mask, and I see my MD about once a month. I'm supposed to pay for this HOW?!

GOD DAMMIT!!!!!!

...I got a twitter account. I'm illusiongrl.

Sigh. I resisted for so long. But the fangirl aspect just couldn't be ignored in the end.

I wasn't going to do this, but I couldn't help myself...



( And then there's the dadaist set: )

Last night's thing was good, but the new theme for this month is beauty, which made me itchy. First we had to write down a list of things in response to "if I were more beautiful, I would..." (including, a more beautiful parent, wife, etc - not just physical appearance) which I did dutifully, but I kept thinking of Raven saying that happiness is right here and having something that will make you more beautiful won't make you happy. So I was unsurprised when we inevitably got around to reframing it to "Because I am beautiful, I am..." which was nice. I noticed recently that most of what people make as affirmations they already have, but they don't believe in it yet., so this sort of tied in with that. 

Then we had to write love letters to ourselves, telling ourselves all about what we think is awesome about us, and apologizing for all the times we judged ourselves harshly. A lot of women had a really hard time with this. I didn't really. Secretly, I more or less know I'm awesome, and I've always had an incredible community of people to tell me in case I forget. I had some harsh judgments to cop to, but that was about it. My issues with beauty are sort of different.

I was a really ugly kid. Really. Ugly. I got boobs at 10 but it didn't help much - just made me an ugly kid who everyone thought was a slut because she had boobs. But somewhere around age 15 or 16, I got pretty. Not that it helped people like me anymore. I figured out pretty quickly that you have to be really super nice and self-effacing if they're going to tolerate you looking like that. Above all, never ever ever admit that you know you look good, because you shouldn't be proud of it, you should be ashamed of it. It means that if you turn men on, you owe it to them to do something about it. It means that if you piss off girls, you owe it to them to kiss their asses. So mostly I ignored it and went on as best I could, dragging my integrity on my heel like a piece of toilet paper.

When I joined in with the the wonderful Columbia community, it made me just ridiculously uncomfortable that people pointed out that I was hot, but I also got that hot didn't mean what it meant in the rest of the world, and in fact every single one of us were hot and it was just fun play to make room for us all to shine and flirt and be turned up to 11. The safety of that was so delicious.

Enter the purple catsuit. At festivals I could be me for awhile, and enjoy my body and my beauty. A big part of my love of PDF and Burning Man is that same feeling of permission to be fabulous, and the notion that we're all fabulous, and the wonderful costumage that goes with it.

But that's there. In the real world - even here - I really hate admitting that I like the way I look, even with an extra 30 pounds on me. And it occurs to me that part of why I keep this extra 30 pounds is so that I can feel less threatening to the world. I haven't been able to lose it because unconsciously I don't really want to lose it, because everybody likes the jolly chubby chick who is confident. I'm not sure people wouldn't just think I'm a bitch the other way.

My wedding pictures are another commentary on that. You're supposed to be beautiful at your wedding, so I busted my ass to get in shape for it, and agonized about making sure I'd look pretty for all time. But as soon as it was over, I let it all go. As a modern, feminist-type chick, it's so embarrassing to admit that, but there it is.

So anyway, one of the final things we did was to pass around the mirror and say "I am beautiful" into it, which we're supposed to do 3 times a day. I feel a lot of resistance to it. And I really hated doing it in front of everyone. Which means I need to do this religiously.

It's a funny thing: most of this seems sort of silly new-age lame on the surface, exactly the kind of crap that the big judge in me scoffs at and mocks. But the truth is that there's just so much that comes up around this stuff for me, and I'm really getting something out of it. And it's really reassuring to be in a group of women who are willing to let me be messed up and who are not hiding behind false perfection, but who are trying and growing. So fuck all those judgments about it. This is where I need to be. And I love this community of beautiful women! CoMo tribe, I so wish you could meet them.

it's growing on me enough that I'll get season 1 and see what I think. Not happy about Boomer though. Grr.

Also? Fucking annoyed at the word "frak".