Monday, Monday

I really need to stop sleeping in over the weekend, because then Monday comes and I am so...effing...tired, and all the coffee Juan Valdez can pack over to me on his mule cannot keep me awake.  All day I dream of napping, and it's crazy hectic at work, and then I get home and it's make dinner get OD to her cello lesson take The Son to return the shoes he doesn't like go to the grocery store get everyone showered/homeworked/tucked and pluck George The Superpet's ear hair (yes, I do that) and then one would think I would be ready for bed and SURPRISE!  I'm wide awake.  Sure to be dead ass tired again tomorrow.

I did start this book last night, which is terrific so far:

It's a dog book, so I'm sucked in.  I read these books and I get engrossed, but there's also this voice in the back of my head that says, "You need to write your book" and I say "I don't have time right now" and the voice pesters me until I start yelling at it, "Do you have any idea how fucking hard it is to write a book!?!  And one that is actually good and has a story and proper English that people will read that doesn't have sparkly vampires in it because that is so 2010?!"

I love a good book.  I have been reading since I was four, and I love nothing better in life than losing myself in a book, where I am so obsessed with it that I can't put it down, and when I'm forced to put it down I can't stop thinking about when I can pick it back up again.  I will take a good book, and I mean a REALLY good book that is one of the obsession books, over sex, coffee, wine, pasta and tiramisu.  THAT is how much I love books. 

There are loads of books I've been this obsessive with in my life, but ones that pop into my mind immediately are - Jane Austen books (except for Northanger Abbey, which was okay but I could put it down and live), Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston, The Good People of New York and Out of the Girls Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen, Cooked Little Heart and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, Devil in the White City by Eric Larson, It Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies, the entire Twilight series, the entire Harry Potter series, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, Room by Emma Donoghue, all Jen Lancaster books, the Hunger Games series, and the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson.  As a kid, it was Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Trumpeter Swan, anything by Judy Blume and of course The Flowers in The Attic series.  Ish.

On deck right now I have A Tale of Two Cities, Portrait of a Lady, Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch by Hollis Gillespie, It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro, and am awaiting Stacey Ballis's new book whenever it may come because I did love Good Enough to Eat.  And David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.  And With a Little Luck by Caprice Crane.

(I have to stop writing this because I have spent the last 20 minutes going back and adding another book I love to the "obsessed with" list.  Because I'm obsessed.)

But with a Pesky Full Time Job, my work severely cuts into my reading time, and then the Mothering takes over the non-paid-work time, so I find myself reading until all hours of the night and then waking up vowing never to do it again and covering the perpetually deep shadows under my eyes with foundation.  Open Memo to People at Work: I'm not being beaten, I'm reading.

What exactly is my point here?

That I write every single day, and have been writing pretty steadily for 15 years, and I can tell you firsthand that it is DAMN HARD to write a book.  Try it, I dare you.  I'm about 2/3 of the way through my first novel, which is about 60,000 words (the average blog post is about 600-900 words), and I haven't TOUCHED the novel in over a year.  I know how it's going to end.  I just haven't written it down.  And then when you start writing it, it changes.  The book actually takes your thoughts and says, "Bullshit, that would never happen.  THIS is what that character REALLY wants to do!"  I have another book rolling around in my head, and a collection of short stories too.  But guess what?  No publisher is going to pay me to tell them all about the stories and not write them down.  It's that tricky technicality of calling oneself a writer...you actually have to WRITE.

Every week, I say, "once we get through the school year I'll make time to write", then "once we get through the summer, I'll make time to write" and "Once school starts again, I'll make time to write" and now it's "once I finish this freelance project for CH..." and "once we finish the basement..."  One of these days I might actually do it, but honestly people, I'm 42 and I start worrying that I'm never going to purge these words.  It's like John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

Every time I hear the song, "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield, which I'm pretty sure she wrote specifically for me, I think Get Your Ass In Gear, Girl!  Do you have a lifelong ambition that is unmet?  Do you have something you are just dying to do and just don't do it?  What is holding you back?  Am I alone in thinking my epitaph is going to be "Unfulfilled potential?"  Lay it on me, Wifers, if Blogger will let you comment.  What is on your mind?  If you can't comment here, go to the FB page and do it there.  I want to know!

I'd Like A Blizzard, a Snow Blower and a Tapeworm, Please

As John Lennon once wrote, "And so this is Christmas, and what have you done? Bought a damn Blizzard machine, you now weigh a ton."


But if John Lennon DID write that, he would be lying, because anyone who bought the DQ Blizzard machine has found themselves practically Blizzard-less, because that damn $40 machine makes a 2 ounce serving. Hello! I bought the thing not for my child's joy, but so that she would be forced to make me Blizzards on demand.

Look at the kids on the box:

Don't they look all coked up?  Those big, wide eyes say, "I've had 32 ounces of processed sugar and dairy products and I'm going to clean the bathroom floor with a toothbrush at 2 a.m."   Once again, I am sucked into false advertising.

THIS is what I was expecting:

Come to Momma.

This is what I got:

A spaceship that poops 2 oz. of half-and-half, and a pissed off kid.

 Another issue I have with the DQ Blizzard Maker?  Where are the effing Reese's Peanut Buttter cups?  WHERE?!?!  It includes little packets of "Popping Candy", but who honestly orders their Blizzard with Pop Rockets on them?  M&M's, Brownie Batter, Reese's, Heath Bar...lots of things would suffice, but strawberry flavored hydrochloric acid?  Not on the menu, people.

Basically, this DQ Blizzard Maker purchase was just another exercise in futility toward my dream of having a Joan Jetson kitchen.

 

Fried chicken?  Let's just push the button. 

Rut-Row!  We got Blizzards!

Maybe I just misunderstood the product.  Maybe it wasn't some vanilla-flavored-sugared-up-lactose-crack at all.  MAYBE it was a Narnia-type machine, whereupon opening the box, an actual BLIZZARD descended upon the land around you, and the White Witch would appear and offer you Turkish Delights, but I just opened the box enough that eight inches of snow fell around my house and Current Husband complained all day that he would have to shovel it and then when he went out to start the 2-year-old snow blower it wouldn't start but instead had gasoline flowing down the back of it.  Is that a Turkish Delight?  Because I think I did it wrong.

Let's Recap:

• No actual Reese's Blizzard
• No child waiting on me
• No cracked-up sugar-jacked kids cleaning my house
• No snow blower
• No Turkish Delight

If that wasn't enough, I had a large salad for dinner tonight, because there is about to be an intervention regarding my Christmas sugar-cookie problem.  Here is the magnet CH had best not give me:

Oh, Onion.  I love you so.

Instant Halloween Karma

Halloween is over, and now I'm stuck with 800 pieces of candy and probable Type 2 Diabetes. I don't even want to know how much unrefined sugar I have flowing through my veins. And I'm still creeped out by Mark David Chapman, but I'll get back to that.

I'll be in Arizona at the end of this week and gone for 10 days in Texas for Thanksgiving, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo, so this month is going to be tough, and I apologize in advance for the crappy sloppy seconds writing the blog is going to endure. For those who aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's a writing marathon where over 100,000 writers commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November (National Novel Writing Month). I've written 896 words so far. You need to write about 1700 words per day to keep up. Ouch. (For any NaNoWriMos who need a writing buddy, I'm Snarkypants.) I may post some of it here, if I'm not too mortified.

So Halloween is over. This year, my seventh grader still wanted to Trick or Treat with a friend. Since I'm still trying desperately to keep her young and immature, I looked around for a costume at stores, as a homemade costume would be mortifying at her age. I did not go the store route, because costumes in her size all had stickers on the front that said "IMPREGNATE ME". Hey preteen girls! Would you like to be a sexy cop? Or a sexy chef? Or a sexy crossing guard? Or a sexy S&M film star? And then next year you can be an incredibly unsexy baby momma working at the BP store selling lottery tickets and cigarettes to your meth dealer and GUESS WHAT! THAT costume isn't just for Halloween, it's for the rest of your life! Yay for you! She ended up being a Barbie, and we live in interesting times when the tamest costume you can come up with for your daughter is Barbie.

My son wanted to be Uncle Sam. So easy, right? No. The store costumes available to him were Mass Murderer, Blood-covered Zombie, Serial Killer, Ultimate Fighter, Dark Side Superhero or Star Wars. Hello, Goodwill. We ended up putting red stucco tape down the sides of white basketball warm up pants, duct taping a navy blue blazer from Goodwill, and cutting up a serial killer beard to make an Uncle Sam goatee and eyebrows. He won the costume competition at the school's Fall Fun Fest (not to be mistaken for a Halloween party, because that is too pagan and devil-worshipping for the public school day), but now the expectation for next year is even higher. I'm guessing he will want to be the Invisible Man. You can do that, right Mom?

I like to dress up to walk with the kids, because they think it's fun and it gives me a chance to indulge my complete immaturity. My youngest daughter was dressed up as Dorothy, from the Wizard of Oz, so I talked my good friend into being Galinda to my Elphaba. She's a partner in a large law firm, so it usually takes two glasses of wine to make her stop thinking about umbrella policies and liability claims, and by the time we were walking around the neighborhood, Galinda was waving her wand over the adults and telling them all of their wishes would be granted at midnight. She became Sexy Good Witch, and she did not take off her crown or my old prom dress until well after midnight. I told her to wear it home and make someone's wishes come true; it wouldn't be the first time that dress was hitched up around someone's hips. (Just kidding Mom!)

So Galinda and I are preparing to sweep the neighborhood, and this boy comes up the walk at her house looking like a Vietnam Vet. She gives him a King-Sized Hershey bar and he looks at her with dead eyes and says, "Just one?" And she says "Happy Halloween!" and shuts the door. We gather our children and leave the house.

A few blocks later, we see Vietnam Vet kid, and he is waving a silver gun around, demanding candy from people at their doors. Everyone is looking a little frightened, and we all notice how the kid is probably 11 or 12, is trick-or-treating alone, and has no adult supervision. He gets the candy at the door, turns and smiles a little evil smile and saunters to the next house. We are troubled, but forget about it as we are chasing six kids across streets where adults still insist on driving large trucks that say "Stump Removal" on the side and gun their accelerators every time a small child gets in the way.

We trick-or-treat at my house, where Current Husband is dressed up as The Edge, clearly hoping to get lucky. We get candy, and I drop off the dog, who has been dressed as The Cowardly Lion and has eaten about 25% of the brown yarn off of his mane and three dropped Starburst in their wrappers. CH says, "Have you seen the guy who killed John Lennon?" Uh, what? CH got a good look at the kid when he came to our door, and he was wearing a camouflage jacket that had the name "LENNON" on the front. CH said the kid waved his weapon around and was singing Imagine on the way down the walk. WHAT!?!? The kid was dressed up as Mark David Chapman, Lennon's assassin!!! Aaaah! As a huge John Lennon fan, I was going to have to find this boy and steal his candy. And take his most likely real gun. And micro-chip him.

Galinda and I swept the rest of the neighborhood, but we didn't see Mr. Future Juvenile Delinquent again. But as I ate my 15th Reese's Peanut Butter cup, accompanied by a lovely Shiraz, Watchin' the Wheels go round and round, I consoled myself with the fact that Instant Karma was gonna get him. And knock him in the head.