Welfareloser's Blog

(what follows is a literary technique known as “fucking with the timeline.” see, if you write the exciting ending first, it gets people hooked so that they actually sit through the confusing and/or boring beginning.)

so, my plans have gotten a little fucked with lately. 5 months ago, i weighed 110 lbs, i bought a bikini, i had a few beers with my friends several nights a week, and i was looking forward to my youngest kids going to school so i could get back to writing – something i haven’t done a heck of a lot of since the twins were born – possibly even in my own office, if we could manage a 4-bedroom house when we move next summer.

then i got knocked up. there will be no office, no free time, and no bikini. no beer either, and on top of that, all of my best friends just moved away. my plans could not be more trashed if i came home to find my husband in bed with two strippers (which is really more along the lines of incipient hot foursome than major marital upheaval, anyway.) and life is good. i mean REALLY good. not even in the shock of learning of the existence of a baby i was trying pretty hard not to have was i anything other than happy. as i was thinking about it yesterday, i realized that whether or not your plans work out has absolutely nothing to do with how happy you are. ever. at all.

i know people who have had most of their major plans not work out, who have not gotten most of the big things they wanted to achieve, and they are happy people. my sister got denied about every major academic path she wanted to take – the study abroad program, the grad school. she once worked as a maid in a scary roadside motel for a summer because she had gotten so jerked around by school that by the time they told her they weren’t letting her into the academic path she wanted, after all, all the good jobs were taken. i mean, she didn’t just not get what she wanted, she got the rug actively pulled out from under her feet multiple times on some really big things… and guess what – none of it made her unhappy. she eventually carved an extremely satisfying path for herself through what life handed her. no dwelling on what might have been, no bitching about things that couldn’t be changed.

i know some people who get everything they want and then some handed to them on a silver platter – the perfect child exactly when they wanted him, the career that magically stays on track no matter how hard they try to fuck it up, the greatest spouse in the world, a beautiful place to live with opportunities for fun at every turn – who can’t seem to help but bitch and moan about it all every minute of the day. what’s great isn’t good enough, what’s happening isn’t happening fast enough (nevermind the fact that actually doing something instead of wasting time bitching might speed things up,) what’s fun they don’t make time for, and most importantly, it’s all SOMEBODY ELSE’S FAULT. dwelling on what might have been and on how other people seem to have the gall to be happy near them is a major pastime.

so. nodamnsense’s mom once said that you have to *choose* happiness. wiser words were never spoken. so i was sitting out at a sidewalk cafe table at the new starbucks in campustown, having just dropped evilgremlin off at first grade, and the twits at their very first day of morning preschool. it was a gorgeous day, the pumpkin cream cheese muffin totally rocked, and i was having a great time doing some quality work on my long-neglected novel. it occured to me that my plans for the next 5 years had just evaporated completely. see, i was going to work about 6-10 hours a week on my manuscript over the summer, get it off to publishers at the end of the summer, then get back to work on my second novel in the fall, upping my writing time to 12+ hours a week once all three of my kids were in school. then when we moved, i’d have my own office, and in two more years, my youngest would be in all day school, and i’d be back to writing pretty much full time at the respectably young age of 32.

instead, i spent this summer taking long naps through the first trimester, even as the twits gave up their naps. i worked all of 2 hours a week on my manuscript, if that. the twits are in preschool, mwf mornings, giving me a total of 9 hours a week…temporarily. the first manuscript is still in need of an overhaul, the clock is ticking, and by the end of january, it’s back to sleepless nights, diaper changes, and more puke than i will ever be able to scrub off the walls. it’s going to be 6 years from now when my youngest goes to school full-time, putting off my hopeful career another 4+ years.

and it’s good. i couldn’t be happier. my plans working out couldn’t make me happier. that doesn’t work for anybody. if you’ve made a habit of moping and blaming, getting your dream job isn’t going to make your life better. getting that baby you’ve been trying to have for years isn’t going to make you happy. i’ve seen people get all that and more and continue to be the same miserable sacks of crap they’ve always been. take the axiom “money can’t buy happiness,” and widen the scope to an epic scale. NOTHING can get happiness for you. not money, not a baby, not a location, not a job, not fame, not a successful personality surgery on your spouse, nothing. either you find it in yourself or you’ll never have it. when i assess the people i know, i see that how well things have worked out for them has aboslutely no correlation with how happy they are.

so. here’s my plan B. actually, at this point, it’s plan QQ or so (i’m trying to think of a plan i had that worked out for me, and i’m kind of drawing a blank here.) i have 5 months of MWF mornings before the new baby arrives. since the twits’ preschool is only about 5 minutes from our house, i can squeeze a full 2:45 of manuscript work out of each of those three mornings – in that time, i don’t clean, i don’t shower, i don’t answer the phone, i don’t screw around, i just write. and that’s more than enough to get this last major editing overhaul done. and THAT sets me up perfectly for writing a cover letter every couple of months or so to send it off, one at a time, to the twenty or so mid-level fantasy publishers out there. getting a rejection is an opportunity to send it to the next publisher (and also to get stinking drunk!) my second novel will continue to stay stuck at about 60 pages of first-draft material for a few more years. what i had in mind? nope. but it works. for all the joking i do about how many street drugs i’ll have to turn to when i have 4 kids, about how by the time i’m skinny again i’ll be too old to care, about how i’ll never have my own office… it’s all crap. i didn’t plan it, it just kinda came out of nowhere and took me by surprise (okay, yes, i do know how that happens, thank you; you know what i mean) i would rather have this beautiful little baby than anything else i might (or might not!) have to do without. every time i feel it move, or a free baby cereal sample shows up in the mail, i can’t help but smile. at the end of the day, it’s all just funny. and good.

anyway, since i was telling this story from end to beginning, here’s the beginning: i dropped EG off at 8:15, the twits off at 8:30, and decided to treat myself on my first day of freedom by burning 20 minutes on driving and $2 on parking, to take my laptop (“laptop” being a glossy euphemism for “spongebob gameboy with second-rate hack cartridge in it”) to starbucks. the breeze was cool, the sun was warm, the coffee rocked, and this goofy-ass baby was assing around like nobody’s business, rolling and stretching and pushing but very rarely kicking, which is exactly how my mom describes my in utero movements (in sharp contrast to those of my sister or any of my three boys.) it felt good to work on my book, it felt good to imagine what kind of a person this baby is going to be. at the table next to me, some grad student was bitching about her job with more venom than the actual problem seemed to be worth, and it hit me: she’s one of THOSE people. a list of things she wanted and didn’t get, and of things people have done to wrong her, and things she wants to change but can’t (or won’t, because she’s too busy bitching), has taken up permanent residence in her head. people who try to cheer her up, or worse, suggest ways to fix her problems, get indignantly rebuffed (“nooooo, that won’t help becaaaaaaause…”), and then become targets of her spewed misery; the more she can get to stick to them, the more satisfied she is. someday she’ll be screaming at her husband that he’s having too much fun and he needs to stay home with her on saturday night so they can “talk about us.” she’s the woman who is going to bemoan the fact that raising children is sooooo hard (mostly so she can feel justified in resenting others for not fixing it for her,) and that she just feels like she’s LOST HER TRUE SELF in becoming a mother (and it’s her husband’s fault, of course.) right. i know women who act like that, and trust me, nothing will fix it; not the perfect obedience she will try to get out of her husband, not the perfect daycare, not the diet, not staying at home, not working outside the home, not a balance of both. (and no, i’m not just knockin women here… men are just as prone to being a bitch about this stuff, just in a slightly different form. there’s always the guy who wants to blame his responsibilities – that is, wife and children – for keeping him from fulfilling his dreams – for example, being a professional golf player, nevermind the fact that he’s always been spectacularly mediocre, which is why he didn’t pursue it in the ten years of adulthood BEFORE he got married.) misery loves company, and unless she takes a good look at herself and decides to change, the closest she’s ever going to come to happy is in being satisfied at making other people as miserable as she is. and from what i’ve seen, that’s a cold, hollow, and very temporary satisfaction that only leaves you hungry for more. empty happiness calories, so to speak, and the people who take a steady diet of them can never get enough. to continue the food metaphor, maybe i’m like the skinny bitch who feels smugly superior to the fat people out there, but damn am i happy that’s not me. i’m happy in general. i don’t see any sense in being anything else.

preachy? yeah. i know. this was mostly meant to be a celebration of what’s good in my life, but i just couldn’t do it without commenting on how some people who get what they want so often don’t even try to turn that success into happiness. i’m not bitching really, but i’m confounded. i don’t get it. if i’m describing you, consider this your wakeup call. nobody’s going to hand you happiness. it’s kind of like laying there in bed pissed off waiting for someone to give you an orgasm. not gonna happen, okay? it’s on you.

so, to wrap this up: as i’m sitting there enjoying the morning, i notice a smell of butter and vanilla wafting over from somewhere behind me. as i’m thinking, damn, whatever that is, i need to get me some of it, i turn around and see that it’s coming from a brand new coldstone creamery. holy shit, the best ice cream on earth, which previously had not a single location within 100 miles, which i have been dreaming about ever since having it in denver (i’m pregnant, remember? stop laughing; it’s not my fault). talk about making a perfect day orgasmic; i went back later with the kids and got my cake batter ice cream, chocolate for EG, and pistachio ice cream with m&m’s and gummi bears for the twits. then, making the perfect day absolutely complete (and literally orgasmic!) it finished up with a scrabble game, a phone call with my best friend, a good movie in bed, and really hot sex (mostly in bed.) now, i can imagine PRM cringing and imagining my mother reading this, at which point i would remind him of the time my mom was giving him some shit about knocking me up (“aren’t you supposed to be a doctor?”), and he responded that it was a medical fact that really rough sex can blow out a vasectomy. all i’m sayin is that i’m not exactly blowing the needle off the shock-o-meter here.

moral of the story: life is good. and god loves happy retards. which means he may hate you, but i’m shittin in tall cotton!

okay, sorry for the pontificating. next post will be back to sarcastic inappropriate humor. and, just to make sure you get at least one laugh out of this post, i must show you the most recent naughty tomato from prm’s garden: