Welfareloser's Blog

so it’s not just my kids that are back in school; the college kids are, too. all 30,000 of them! i’ve lived in three midwestern, college towns in the last ten years – ann arbor, champaign-urbana, and now iowa city. they’re all demographically similar – town of under 100,000, big 10 university with about 30,000 students, 4 hours from chicago and thus littered with transplants from the suburbs. oh, and don’t forget a goodwill store full of completely awesome books (thank you literate populace with small downtown apartments!), and really nice designer clothes (thank you kegs and birth control pills, helping undergrad girls donate their suddenly-20-lbs-too-small clothes to my closet since 1995!) and i have absolutely loved living in all of them, but this place is the best of them, by far. champaign-urbana was enginerdy. ann arbor was comically artsy-fartsy to the point of being surprisingly elitist.

iowa city has two major, and majorly overlapping, demographics: writers and musicians. i’ve talked about how accessible the music community is here, and the writers’ community is no different. the university of iowa is the home of the iowa writers’ workshop, the nation’s first master’s degree program in creative writing. i didn’t realize it until after i got here, but some of my favorite writers came from the iowa writers’ workshop: Ray Bradbury, Jane Smiley, Kurt Vonnegut.

the effect of the writers’ workshop spills over into the community at large. for example: both of our previous locations had really good public libraries. i had no complaints. but the one here is AMAZING. this one has every single book in every fantasy-adventure series i’ve ever wanted to read. if the kids are looking for something, they find it, plus 10 other books on the same subject. the audiobook selection is huge and composed entirely of UNABRIDGED books (if you’ve never gotten into books on tape – a fabulous way to pass the time cleaning the kitchen and folding the laundry – let me tell you, there is nothing more annoying than starting a book, wondering why the hell the pacing seems so off, then wondering why you feel like you missed something important, then wondering what the fuck is going on at all, then looking at the cd case and seeing in the fine print at the bottom, the word “abridged.”) i have yet to look for something at this library and not find it. and best of all is that when you strike up a conversation with other people there, they talk about, among other things, books. and not in a pretentious “well of COURSE i’ve read the latest Great American Novel, and by the way, my favorite author? tolstoy!” they’re perfectly happy admitting they like fantasy adventure or romance novels.

the sidewalks downtown, in the ped mall and for several blocks around it, are littered with stamped-into-the-concrete aphorisms about books: “words are either dreams or swords.” “don’t keep a diary, or someday it will keep you.” “a good book is the truest essence of the human soul.” some are tongue-in-cheek, like “a wicked book cannot repent – old english proverb.” and between the stamps, the sidewalks are also set with metal plates, designed by local artists, featuring a bit of text from a book by an iowa writer, and an illustration to go with it. they’re really gorgeous, it makes walking downtown even more fun, and a lot of the quotes are intriguing enough that i’ve added the books to my “need to acquire” list. one of my favorites:

“maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.”

the public schools here do their own version of a writers workshop as well – EvilGremlin has authored a couple of books so far, and the writing process was intense (and by intense, i don’t mean stressful or difficult, just detailed and fun. i mean, it’s grade school. plenty of time for him to be depressed, drunk and poetically maudlin when he’s got some body hair!) by the end of second grade, he could discuss his plot, character development, pacing, and prose. he’s a very self-aware writer, and i think it rocks that he usually takes a couple of hours a day – outside of school! – to make up stories, write them down, draw pictures, and bind them into books. hell, the twits have been in kindergarten all of two weeks, and tonight they requested that we go to the bookstore… in a couple of hours. first, they wanted to write some books to sell there (the idea being to raise enough funds to buy some rather expensive books in a series that i told them i would not be spending anymore money on… yeah. that was too damned cute. they won, and after member discount, coupon, and reward credit card rebate, i still blew about $60 on uncover a cobra for EvilGremlin, uncover a dog for SpazMonkey, uncover a t. rex for Dramaqueen, and Evilgremlin insisted that MonkeyBeef really, really wanted uncover a tarantula. to go with the human body, shark, and frog that we already own. but i drew the line at uncover a race car, dammit! because i’m no pushover!)

what’s really cool is the number and quality of writers who come to speak here – at our indie bookstore, prairie lights, at the public library, at the university. and it’s not just authors on book tours, being pimped out by their agents and publishers. there are plenty of writers who come to talk about writing with other writers… just because. and it’s awesome. in the last year, i’ve gotten to go see peter sis, whose work i’ve been in love with ever since starry messenger, a children’s book about the catholic church’s persecution of galileo, nancy horan, author of loving frank, one of the best books i’ve read this year, and last night, probably my second favorite author ever, chuck klosterman.

i made it to the theater downtown where chuck was speaking about 45 minutes early, and there was already a line of 50 people or so. and most of them were undergrads. at this point, 32 years old, i avoid 21-and-under crowds to avoid feeling like a douchebag. there’s nothing sadder than some 30-something trying to blend in with a bunch of teenagers. not only is it creepy, it kills the fun for the kids.

so i got a good seat, and listened to the conversations around me. there was one guy who loudly whining about how he was just here for the extra credit… just the one. everyone else was talking about what they were reading or what they were writing. there was a mention here and there of a writing assignment, but mostly, people were talking about what they were writing FOR FUN. talking about it with their eyes lit up, nerding out about writing. writing plays, writing short stories, writing novels. eventually, a group of graduate students drew me into their conversation, by asking what i wrote. when i replied, “fantasy adventure,” one of them said, “so does matt. HEY MATT!” a guy several rows in front of us turned around. “DUDE! ANOTHER DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS NERD HERE!” so we threw the horns at each other and nerded out a bit, and i quit feeling like a douchebag. i’m usually pretty shy about my writing – i’ve let all of about five people read my first novel, and if i had it my way, i’d never mention to anyone that i’m a writer at all (positiverolemodel likes to ruin my carefully cultivated slacker persona – when i tell people that i watch cartoons for a living, he tells them about the writing. which is why i get him back by telling y’all about him falling asleep on a plate of hot wings in bed!) so it was incredibly cool to not only feel comfortable talking about it, but to be able to talk about it with people who are just as excited about it as i am.

now, the impression that i had of the university of iowa before i came here could be summed up about like this: if you’re from chicago, and you’re not in the top 25% of your high school class, you can’t get into the university of illinois, but you can get into the university of iowa. the university of iowa recently offered professors $500 per semester if they would simply hold a class on friday, cutting down on the number of undergrads who have schedules free of friday classes (and thus a three-day drinking weekend.) tailgating shuts down the downtown for 12 hours, to the point that you have to argue at length with policemen just to be allowed to drop your husband off at work at the hospital on a game day. girls go to class in cute little skirts instead of pajamas. it’s a party school.

i couldn’t have been more impressed with the intellectual quality of the students in that theater. the conversations before the author spoke were intelligent and interesting and fun, as were the questions they asked the author afterwards. and i love the fact that klosterman was invited by the university to kick off welcome week. the small-town cardiologist who endowed the lecture committee wanted welcome week speakers who “had something serious to say without taking themselves too seriously.” have i mentioned how much i love it here?

klosterman gave a great talk, followed by a reading from his first work of fiction, due out next month. and seriously, the audience was in tears for most of the reading. he had to pause after almost every paragraph for the laughter. comparing him to james lee burke and david sedaris really doesn’t do him justice, but it’s a good start. and his book wasn’t just funny – it was GOOD. i have a terrible time articulating what makes a writer a great writer, but it goes a little something like this: they are able to say something really novel and insightful and true about why a character did or said or thought or felt something. a great writer has the ability to comment on human nature in a way that takes something that is obvious, something that we all know, but only subconsciously, and succinctly give the reader a framework to think about it consciously. and it feels like… *BAM!* and then, “aaaahhhh.” like scratching an itch. and klosterman’s fiction was littered with those clever little insights. i was so into what he read, i’m seriously considering pre-ordering two copies of the book, downtown owl, just so PRM and i can read it at the same time.

anyway, that was about the best 3 hours i’ve spent in an audience, ever. i came home more excited than ever about writing. IT’S ON!

like last month, i learned from playboy that a toddler laughs an average of 200 times per day.

this is why: toddlers are easily amused.

i don’t know if every parent goes through this, or if it’s just me, but when the phone rings, and the caller id shows that it’s one of the kids’ schools, i freak. kinda like “innocent until proven guilty,” any call from the school is “biblical catastrophe until proven benign.”

and they always seem to be masters of NOT GETTING TO THE FUCKING POINT. for example, i got a pre-recorded, auto-dial-every-parent-in-the-district call on wednesday, saying that 5 district schools were “on lockdown,” due to “an incident that occured” in a nearby park. this was “just a precaution.”

umm. okay. first off, i’m goign to find out what the fucking incident was. it’s not like they’re sparing me the details; they’re just forcing me to waste time getting them. secondly, do you REALLY think you’re preventing panic? because trust me, no matter what the “incident” was, what i’m imagining is worse. what the fuck could be happening in a park near a school that would cause them to lock up the kids? well, someone shooting at kids. in this case, it was a professor who had been fixing grades for sexual favors was seen sitting in his truck near the park with a rifle (and he still hasn’t been located.) so, you know what? yeah, that’s scary, but crazy dude disappearing with a gun is less scary than the crazy dude USING his gun that i was imagining.

so, friday, 10:15 AM, i get a call from the school. the secretary proceeds to not get to the point. after asking if she was speaking to mrs. loser, asking me how i’m doing today (fine until you called!), she tells me that SpazMonkey needs to be picked up because he has a temperature of 101.2.

i believe i’ve mentioned before that you can tell my kids are sick because they become screamy. i’m assuming that’s what his teacher was politely communicating when i picked him up and she said he “just wasn’t himself this morning.”

he seemed fine to me, running his mouth about a picture he was coloring in the nurse’s office, smiling and waving goodbye to everyone. i was about to wonder if they had taken his temperature rectally after having him run a few laps around the playground, when he suddenly stopped dead at the door of the van.

SM: I DON’T WANNA GO HOME. I WANNA GO TO SCHOOL.
me: but you have a fever.
SM: NO I DON’T I HAVE A SCHOOL.
me: a fever is when your body is too hot. your body is too hot from germs-
SM: I’M NOT SICK!
me: -and if you stay at school you will give the germs to other kids and make them sick too, so you have to come home now.

and then he revealed that he was, in fact, quite sick. at top volume. for a good 20 minutes. i stopped at panera to get a takeout lunch, and, as usually happens when one of my kids speaks in public, he had the entire restaurant of retirees laughing their butts off with his monotone rant. it went a little something like this:

I’M NOT SICK I DON’T HAVE GERMS I DON’T WANT YOU I WANNA GO TO SCHOOOOOOOOOOOL HEY WHAT DOES THAT WORD SPELL I DON’T LIKE THIS STORE DO YOU HEAR ME MOM I’M NOT SICK TAKE ME BACK TO SCHOOL MY BODY IS NOT TOO HOT I NEED ICE AND YOU TAKE ME BACK TO SCHOOL I DON’T WANT YOU I WANT MY BROTHERS I DON’T WANT A MUFFIN TAKE ME OUT OF THIS STORE I WANT TO PLAY AT RECESS I NEED A PAPER TISSUE MY BOOGERS ARE FALLING OUT OF MY NOSE DOES THIS STORE HAVE PAPER TISSUES MY SCHOOL HAS PAPER TISSUES I WANNA GO BACK TO SCHOOL NOW WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

he calmed down by the time we walked out of panera. okay, i thought that kid talked a lot when he’s with his brothers. but he actually does stop for a breath now and then to let them talk, too. when it’s jsut him? holy crap, he didn’t shut up all day. even when he sat down to draw stuff, he had a raging monologue about what he was drawing and why. he asked me to fix the xbox for him – little turd decided to try out some softmodding a few weeks ago and erased the damned operating system – and as i sat down to the computer to try that, he noticed the scanner. and asked what it was for. then asked me to scan his artwork. then talked about how awesome it was to have his artwork on the computer. then asked me why i didn’t have the xbox fixed yet…

yep. so, here we have “DINOSAUR FIGHT”

“YOU AT YOUR COMPUTER MOM!”

“THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIXING THE XBOX” (note that this involves a chainsaw and an indiana jones hat.)

“THE MAP TO FIXING THE XBOX”

then IAlsoHaveADream emailed: I think I could actually hear SpazMonkey spouting off that entire “I want to go back to school” rant. And if it makes you feel any better, I drew you a picture too. You can share it with him.

i did share it with him, and the visual aid made him much more impressed with IAlsoHaveADream’s new job.

SM: I THOUGHT YOU SAID HIS WORK WAS WRITING TO PEOPLE TO ASK THEM FOR MONEY.
me: yep.
SM: THAT’S A AWESOME WORK!

i’m suddenly going from a house full of 4 little boys, 3 of them preschoolers, to having 3 of them in school for 6-1/2 hours a day, 5 days a week. so i was up late the night before… keeping busy… finally ran out of things to do, and as we were falling asleep at 2 am, yeah, i cried. no, i’m not being overprotective, and i’m not creepily attached to my kids. this is a positive thing that i feel good about. and good lord, all three of them are excited (you’d have thought it was christmas the way they stayed up late and then got up early, tearing around the house, putting on their backpacks and mismatched socks at the buttcrack of dawn), and i’m excited for them. but it’s so much fun to be the one who teaches them everything, witnesses all their awesome moments and kisses away (or laughs at, depending) all their sucky moments. and now, i’ve got two more heading out into the world where they will be learning and doing and growing without me.

so there’s that one aspect of it that’s a little sad, but, like i said, this is a positive thing. the kids love school, and i love writing. and after a two-year hiatus, i get to do it again. more on that in a moment. first, here are the pictures.

the school supplies. 8 bags of them. 22 glue sticks. 7 notebooks. 9 boxes of markers. 6 boxes of crayons. 72 #2 pencils. oh, walmart, how i forgive you your sins when you put gluesticks on sale for 10 cents each, enabling me to get out the door for (just) under $100:

DramaQueen proudly announced that he could tie his shoes all by himself for school:

the glory of the knots notwithstanding, note that his feet are on top of the tongues.

I am now officially yuppie scum… first, it was putting down a deposit on a preschool for my infant, to assure him a spot in 2010. Now… I bought the twits bento boxes for kindergarten.

Because I was looking over their registration stuff, and one of the things they want kids to be able to do is be able to open their food packaging with no help. And they can, but often with spillage and breakage, and there’s no replacing fucked-up food when they’re not at home (and probably no licking pudding off the floor.) so, bento boxes are cool, because they’re airtight like tupperware, but segmented in small portions and easy to open – undo one velcro strap, take off one lid, and you’re looking at a large compartment (juice box and sandwich) on one tier, and three smaller compartments (ketchup, cheese, fruit slices, cookies, whatever) in the second tier. no mess of disposable packaging, (and no paying extra for little bags of oreos and crap), and small portions of a variety of foods = good. also? creepy japanese artwork. score!

and finally… outside the front door as we started walking to school:

then, unable to leave well enough alone with that perfectly successful picture, i had to try to take one in front of the school. apparently, the sun was kinda at the wrong angle for that one:

anyway. all three kids had an awesome time. actually, all four. i was really afraid MonkeyBeef would be distraught over the sudden lack of entertainment, but he spent the morning careening through the toy room laughing to himself… apparently, not sharing toys is kind of awesome.

this first week of school, the kindergarteners are only going half-time, so i’m not writing yet. this week, i’m just catching up on all the stupid daily tasks that have been neglected over the summer. after walking them to school this morning, i came home, watched the daily show, paid some bills, filed several months worth of papers (and by “filed,” i mean “threw away 90% of it, and put the rest in a sorted stack near the file drawers in the basement.”) we went to the grocery store just before noon, and i almost died laughing. (or perhaps the more appropriate exaggeration for the childbearing crowd would be “i almost peed myself laughing!”) the noise level was much higher than usual, not because there were more people there than usual, but because they were all bouncing off the walls like an ADHD convention. the store was full of moms – well-rested, giggling, goofy-ass moms, excited as hell to be grocery shopping without their kids. “i took a NAP!” “i watched TV!” “i read a book!” “i cranked up my music!”

and i was right there with them. i loved this summer. it was fun. i feel really good about how successful i was at keepng 4 kids over a 7-year age range really entertained. i heard “i’m bored” exactly once all summer. i’m mostly sad to see it end, looking over the pictures of them catching bugs, swimming, running through parks, making up games, putting together superhero costumes. we had whole days to find a dozen books on a single subject, like scorpions or buildings, and learn everything we wanted about them. we could spend hours learning to play simple songs really badly on inappropriately loud instruments. we could watch the daily show and discuss politics (“mom, obama punched a baby! he’s an awesome president!” “can you show me heebieland on the map?”) how can it be over? we never even made it miniature golfing, dammit! i miss summer already!

but i’m not even trying to be one of those pain in the ass Best Parents Ever who wants everyone to believe that they love EVERYTHING ABOUT PARENTING, period. yeah, having a baby is awesome, but sleep deprivation sucks donkey balls. any woman who says she NEVER minded it because she loves her baby SO MUCH is a LYING sack of shit for trying to make you feel inadequate. yeah, breastfeeding is cute and snuggly and healthful, but being at the beck and call of a 10-lb bundle of unrestrained id wears thin LONG before the age of 2 years. don’t believe the bitch who says she LOVES EVERY MINUTE of breastfeeding her two-year-old; she got sick of it long before the 1-year mark, just like the rest of us… she was just too lazy to wean! i mean, you don’t understand. the baby CRIED. so she HAD to keep breastfeeding. (“so, uhhh, i’ll just pretend i’m doing it because i love it, and NO ONE WILL KNOW. right. yeah. because the fact that he cries about everything because we never tell him no? yeah, nobody notices that either. because they’re distracted by the awesome parenting inherent in the $40 shoes i bought him because I’M SUCH A GOOD MOMMY. i’m totally pulling this off!”) and yeah, summer vacation was a ton of fun, for the kids and for me, and i feel really good about how well it went, but it was also stressful. the pressure – of being that responsible for that many lives for that many hours a day, every day, and the constant stress of just barely pulling off everything else becasue i was devoting so much time to having fun with the kids – the pressure is off, and it’s a big relief.

even when it’s not summer vacation, my day is pretty highly choreographed. i have to plan several moves ahead, like a chess game, to ensure that no moment is wasted, no action is wasted, so that i get the most effect for my efforts. for example: when i take this laundry basket upstairs, i need to take that pile of books up with me, and that package of toilet paper, and i need to remember to bring that pair of shoes that needs repair back down with me… i need to put his clothes away before bedtime, and he needs to clean his room first, so i need to have him do that this morning before he goes to play at DayDreamer’s house… if we want to make cookies, we need to go to the store, and while we’re there, we need to get this and that to save a trip later, and we need to get to the store by this time so we have enough time to put groceries away, get the toddler down for his nap, and clean out the dishwasher, so we can have the cookies done before it’s time to make dinner… etc. and not only do i do that, i do it all QUICKLY. i run up and down stairs. i run when i clean, and throw stuff into drawers to save time (this is a great way to get kids to help you clean, too. laugh if you will, but i have an 18-month old who, once anything made out of metal or ceramic is out of the way, can finish cleaning out the dishwasher for me with little supervision. seriously. fuck child labor laws! throwing plastic dishes into the right kitchen drawers is fun! now if he could just quit unfolding laundry before stuffing it in drawers, i could start renting his little ass out as a maid….) there’s a constant background noise of planning my moves inside my head. now, during the school year, if i can maintain that level of pressure on myself all day, i can get the house clean AND have an awesome dinner on the table, so the evening is free for all 6 of us to enjoy as a family with no stupid crap to get in our way. i can choose to slack off if i feel like it, and we can chill in a messy house with a frozen pizza for dinner, and it’s still all good.

this summer, slacker days were not an option. i basically had to maintain the high-pressure choreography all day, every day, just to accomplish that bare minimum level of messy-house-and-frozen-pizza that i could get with less effort during the school year. i worked my ass off, and still, tons of things that normally get done got left to pile up. i’m not sure what would have happened had i taken a couple of days off for pure slacking, but it probably would have involved bill collectors and child protective services. banjo practice was spotty, i missed more weekly jam sessions than i attended, even the simplest cooking happened about once a week, at best, and just balling up laundry to carry it up to the right bedrooms got done after 10 PM or before 7 AM.

but summer’s over, and starting next monday, i will finally have the one thing i need to be able to write well, and it’s not alcoholism and suicidal depression. it’s consistent chunks of time 2 hours or longer. some things – like sewing, repairing instruments, playing video games, reading, practicing the banjo or fiddle, blogging – i can do in the 10-minute chunks of time i get here and there when i’m the only adult in charge of a bunch of kids. and i enjoy those things, but i LOVE writing. and to write, i need at least two hours to get anything done, because there are so many different plot ideas and chronologies and character trajectories to keep track of, and i have to really immerse myself in the story and block everything else out to get any quality writing done.

so. it’s not a lot of free time – if you have no kids, or kids that aren’t in school yet, don’t start imagining 9 months of daily freedom. it ain’t quite like that. sick days, holidays, teacher inservice days, etc, add up to an average 4-day school week. if that. and all the stupid housekeeping crap still has to get done, preferably not by putting it off and trying to make it my husband’s problem – take a look sometime at a marriage where the weekends get spent grocery shopping and scrubbing toilets while the kids get shooed away. they’re trying reeeeeeeal hard to convince you that they don’t resent each other. is it working? yeah. (psssst: their sex lives SUCK. so does just about every other aspect of their lives, for that matter. don’t let on that you’ve noticed! it’ll just piss them off more!) busy = bad. unbusy = good.

i’ll take a break here to say: i know this sounds preachy. i sure as hell don’t want ot be a Best Parent Ever, rhapsodizing about a choice i’ve made, with the thinly veiled subtext that your different choice is inferior. i like getting some shit done. people who don’t are cool. the people who annoy me are the ones who pretend they want to get a bunch of shit done, but just *can’t*, no matter how hard they try – and, bless their hearts, they try SO HARD – because circumstances constantly conspire against them. they can’t admit that they just don’t want to get some shit done. if they could admit, they’d be cool. until they do, they’re assholes.

i also don’t want to sound like i’ve got this all figured out, no sweat. i don’t. i mean, i kind of do at this point, but it took some work. and some trial and error. and working through some self-doubt. and plenty of days when i felt like i was not only not pulling it off, but also feeling like i would never pull it off. this is hard. so you’ll have to forgive the self-congratulatory tone, just this once, because dammit, i work hard, i plan carefully, i’ve figured out how to get some shit done that makes me happy, and i’m going to go ahead and declare myself teh winnar!

so, i’m looking at more free time than i’ve had in quite a while, and i know what to do with it. i wrote my first novel during two years worth of EvilGremlin’s three, then two, then one daily nap. then there were a couple of years when i couldn’t write at all, but after life settled down again, when the twits were finally old enough to nap at the same time, on my schedule (and before they were too old for naps), in the 2 mornings a week that EG was in preschool, i completely rewrote that novel during those few hours a week. then came a few more years of nothing more than writing a cover letter to submit the novel to another publisher every 6 months or so. but life keeps changing, i knew i’d get the opportunity to write again, and a year later, there it was: i wrote the first 60 pages of my second novel when EG was in first grade, during the 9 hours a week the twits were in preschool, when i was pregnant with MB.

and now, here i am again, two years later, with three in school, and one still napping for 3-4 hours. all i have to do is make sure i get MonkeyBeef up early enough in the morning that he’s ready for his nap at 11 AM… and then 11 AM until 3 PM dismissal is all mine. i’ll get up early, shower, pack 4 lunches and make 6 breakfasts, get 4 butts out the door, make sure i’ve already eaten and pooped (hey, don’t pretend that’s not important), so that, when the magic me-time begins, it’s ON. i drop what i’m doing, i don’t answer the phone, i don’t screw around, i WRITE. i’ve watched people completely squander precious hours and get jack shit done with twice as much time… you don’t get to shower, make coffee, read the newspaper, go to the mall, and then get down to writing (and by “writing,” i mean “opening up a window with your unfinished paper in it while you screw around on the internet, and occasionally scroll through your document and sigh dramatically at it”) two or three hours into your daycare time, and then whine about how you never get enough time to make progress, dammit. i love being able to learn from somebody else’s mistakes!

that second novel has been hanging at page 60 for two years, but every now and then over those two years, i have an idea that sets my imagination on fire, and i drop what i’m doing and scribble it on a scrap of paper, ignoring rules of punctuation and grammar (kind of like when i’m blogging, only with fewer ellipses and more arrows! note to anyone who wonders what the hell i’m thinking, trying to get a novel published when my writing is this sloppy… you bitches are just getting my first-draft skills. my real writing gets a little more attention to brevity and organization. yep. that’s how much you’re worth to me.) just making sure i capture what was so compelling about the mental image before it fades, and then shove the paper in a file.

i realized a few weeks ago, sitting up in bed with prm, that i would suddenly have the time to get back to writing really soon, and i dug out that file, and read over all those scrawled notes. it didn’t matter that some of them were two years old. they still had “it.” i was caught off guard by how happy it made me. i absolutely love the feeling of my brain being on fire with a good story, of my fingers around a pen or at a keyboard trying to keep up with my thoughts. it’s a high, probably no different from a runner’s high, or the high anyone gets from doing something they love. it feels good to be passionate about something, and i didn’t even realize what a big hole not writing had left in my life. (prm thought this was kind of a “duh,” but screw him. wisdom is a pain in the ass!) i realize now that i’ve tried plugging that hole with other things, but nothing else will quite cut it. (sorry, heroin. you just weren’t fulfilling enough. also, you cost a lot more than spiral notebooks and papermate pens, and i am nothing if not cheap.)

i have a big grin on my face now just thinking about holing up somewhere with a big-ass cup of coffee, shutting out the world, and doing something completely freaking awesome – maybe for as many as 20 hours a week! summer was good. this is good, too. life is good.

yay!

so there was a perfectly good swinging chair thingy sitting in a neighbor’s front yard with a “free” sign on it. “free” signs are one of the most awesome inventions of 20th century america, right behind the cotton gin and wii lightsabers. you can use it to make stuff you don’t want disappear, or to acquire new stuff, with no more effort than it takes to drag the item in question a few feet to your curb, or from a curb to your car. it’s how lady vagimort got her fabulous ride, it’s how we’ve gotten rid of everything from furniture to a 10-foot stack of minnow-catching buckets, and it’s how my kids got a faded yet sturdy chair swing that any three out of their four narrow asses can occupy at any given time:


they managed to get into it without killing themselves, which was good: SWING MOVIE 1. then they started swinging in it: SWING MOVIE 2. this was also good. then the twits stepped off to practice some kickboxing moves. and i discovered that MonkeyBeef had quite suddenly gone from “i am amused yet mildly befuddled as someone else somehow gets the swing i’m sitting in to move, almost as if by magic” to “this is freakin sweeeet; i wonder if i can get it going hard enough to do a 360 and wrap this mother around the bar”: SWING MOVIE 3.

so i said, “fine, you little turd. guess who gets to wear the tard helmet until further notice?”

took him a bit of time to decide, but check out the progression of his facial expressions. turns out he really, really hates the tard helmet.

i’m pretty sure he was prepared to bang head on the floor til the damned thing split like a coconut, had he not managed to stretch the chinstrap enough to slip out of it.

sewing stuff from scratch is a pain in the ass. also, it’s not as cheap as you might think. even low-quality fabric is expensive; it’s almost always cheaper to buy finished clothing than to buy the bolts of fabric to make your own, so once you factor in the time, frustration, and risk of failure in DIY clothing, it’s tough to find a compelling reason to sew your own stuff. unless you need an utterly perfect custom fit, but even then, it’s cheaper and easier to buy something close and then alter it.

so. jedi costumes. i got it all worked out. i’m impressed with myself, which means you now get to sit through all the details!

the twits keep changing their minds as to which jedi they each want to be, but fair enough… there’s basically a “generic black jedi costume” and a “generic brown jedi costume,” and since we own every color and hilt-shape of lightsaber ever made, i really don’t have to draw any lines in the sand, save “no shaving of heads and blackface.” so, the costume goals:

there are several websites that have jedi costumes – for $20, you can get some really cheap crap that’ll last through about two washings. for $120, you can get some pretty deluxe outfits… not including the costume boots (with raised heels and slippery soles, PERFECT for kids wearing long robes in the dark on a halloween sugar high!) and gloves. screw those. equally unattractive option: buying 20 yards of fabric for about the same price and spending 30 hours trying not to fuck it up. next option, a trip to goodwill, isn’t quite going to cut it, because it’d be nice if all the blacks were the same shade of black, and all the browns the same shade of brown.

i finally remembered the existence of american apparel, which is known for simple clothes – clean lines, no ornamentation, no logos, and they use the exact same 17 colors over and over again. scary models, some butt-ugly clothes, but the discount pricing from various amazon sellers makes them jedi supply central!

so, the base outfits, in childrens’ size six, with some boots that were on sale at amazon and will double as plain ol’ snowboots:

then, for the tan tunic, i got a men’s size S cardigan, which should hit the boy at the knees. all i have to do is take off the buttons, shorten the sleeves and make them narrower at the armpit, tapering to wider at the ends, leave the front wide to overlap, and what i have to take out to make the torso narrower in the back will become the sash.

for the brown robes, behold the ugly-ass unisex poncho! get a size M, take off the front pocket, cut it down the front, make the sleeves shorter and bell-shaped, and we have a drapey cape thingy with a ginormous hood!

the poncho didn’t come in black, but the women’s hoody-dress in california fleece did! size L, and we’re set. so, between the dress and the cap-sleeve brown shirt, each boy gets one women’s garment as part of their costume, making their shame equal.

and, while i was ordering all this crap, the twits were disgruntled over the fact that they had no white pants or shirts to their name, so some american apparel plus the cheapest damned women’s slippers i could find at amazon is their new stormtrooper/clonetrooper outfit, to go with the clone trooper voice-changing helmet that was on sale at target last week, ending years of tenuously-civilized turn-taking with the darth vader voice-changing helmet and black cape:

of course, getting the best prices on stuff required ordering from several different sellers, so only about a third of the stuff has showed up so far. so we’re improvising a bit:

EvilGremlin is not into star wars. at all. in fact, i had the following conversation with him last week:

me: hey, wanna watch a movie you’ve never seen before? this is called “the last starfighter.”
EG: nah.
me: why not?
EG: because I hate anything with the word star in it.
me: What?
EG: like STAR wars, STAR trek, battleSTAR galactica. The last STARfighter? I hate it.

i think it’s time for a maternity test on that one.

but anyway, he does like indiana jones, so here’s one of his improvised costumes:

now, MonkeyBeef may not know squat about star wars or indiana jones, but he is big on lightsabers and whips. i can generally keep them away from him, but he figured out how to twist his blankie up into a whip and likes to careen around the room terrorizing his brothers with it. so, he is banned from dressing as indiana jones as far as i’m concerned. he can be a star wars character. i almost bought him an r2d2 costume:

unfortunately, there are two problems. the first is that i seriously doubt the “one size fits all” hat is going to fit on his head. the second? well, why spend $17 when he can borrow a t-shirt from his big brothers, and a 2-kellogs-boxtops-plus-shipping snackbowl from the cupboard, which i already know fits his head:

because free is good, and toddlers don’t know funny-lookin when they see it. this is a kid who walked around with a mullet for a good 24 hours (before i figured out he’d happily hold still and let me finish his haircut if he could see what was going on in the mirror) and his stupid little ass didn’t have enough sense to be ashamed of it. see? i’m a GOOD mommy! that’s $17 i can spend on… well, video games or something.

fly-fishing in the midwest rocks. the pictures just can’t convey how freaking good it SMELLS here. prairie flowers, farmhouses, seclusion, and topping out at 80 degrees… add streams full of trout, and i’m HOME.

the fishing wasn’t as difficult as it might look… the plants are thick, but not particularly tall, so there was plenty of “real” casting in addition to roll-casting and whatnot.

prm thinks he’s funny. also? he apparently doesn’t think our children will be traumatized at any point in the future by pictures of mommy’s ass in the family album:

best of all? our choices of watering holes in the town nearest to the collection of streams we hit this weekend:

stroker’s saloon and beaver’s lounge, conveniently located across the street from each other!

happy birthday to me in addition to this fine staycation package, prm is getting me pickups to electrify the bridges of some instruments. because fiddling and banjo-picking are more fun at top volume with distortion!

buy them this.

i really wouldn’t need to do anything except place the box on the toy room floor and walk away. within 20 minutes, each and every one of them would be standing in line for a CT. or an MRI. i think a CT would be your 1st choice for that type of trauma, but i actually don’t know. and i’m not going to bother asking PRM, because it’s 9PM and the only answer i’m going to get is some poetic nonsense that he thinks is real damn funny.

but it’s the end of day 2 of staycation, and in my continued effort to do fun things that don’t require getting out of bed, i’ve been updating the kids’ amazon wishlists. they were pretty empty and outdated, so i found a bunch of awesome toys to wish for on their behalf, and we’ve also decided to build our own outdoor playcenter – basically, build a massive sawhorse out of 2x4s and use these:

to hang awesome things like these:

just kidding on the stripper pole. maybe.

now, as i browse amazon toys and sports equipment, i keep finding things that unintentionally amuse me. like this:

“Originally performed by the Maori in New Zealand, poi and fire dancing are now seen at festivals, raves, concerts and nightclubs around the world.”
so basically, we’ve once again co-opted a sacred artform from another culture, completely bastardized it, and then mass-marketed it with cheap accessories! go, white man!

also funny is the existence of a game called “cornhole.” and it’s not just the name that’s funny! also funny are the fact that it is the same game called “bean bag toss” when i was in preschool, and professional drunken-ESPN-viewers take it seriously, to the point of raving about a $280 cornhole board that is, as near as i can tell… a board. at an angle. with a hole in it! also, most of the scoreboards and other accessories come with beer can holders. throw in terms like “cornhole bag” and “hardwood” and the giggling never ends!

cornhole bags

scoreboards with beer holders

hardwood cornhole

okay. but now the real reason for this post: i just had a brilliant idea. amazon wishlist has this new-ish feature where you can set up multiple separate wishlists for different people under the same amazon account. now, i’m sure the intent of this feature was to allow parents to create wishlists for their children without the child needing his own email address or credit card, and people can search for the child’s name to find their wishlist directly, without having to look up the parent first.

and i did use it as intended. because i am a good little woman who knows my place.

however, i also think tomorrow night’s entertainment may include me setting up wishlsts for easily mockable celebrities, like rush limbaugh and britney spears. i would fill rush’s wishlist with books by jon stewart, and dildos. britney spears would be wishing for new kids on the block collectibles and parenting books. and dildos.

then, i will be taking bets on which happens first:
–some drunk person laughs his ass off and orders rush limbaugh a dildo (which would ship to me. yay, free dildo!)
–amazon cancels my account

and to answer the question prm just asked: yes, you can buy dildos at amazon. it was big fluff news in all the major media outlets last spring: you can now buy tingly or warming or numbing lubes, “vibrating condoms” (ie, vibrating cock rings with a condom in the box to give it a modicum of legitimacy) and “personal massagers” at drugstores, grocery stores… and amazon!

by the way, should you feel compelled to buy one of those triumphant veiny bastards for yourself, please do so through my amazon link to the right. help a welfare queen out.

i feel like a fan of an underground rock group after they hit it big and sell out. what used to be ueber-cool is now as pedestrian as using “ueber-” as a prefix to an english adjective.

the term “staycation” was coined this summer to describe people no longer torturing their kids and spouses with stressful cross-country car trips due to high gas prices, and staying home for vaction instead.

PRM and i have been taking staycations a couple of times a year since we had kids. and when we’d tell people what we were doing with our 3-9 vacation days – staying in bed all day, maybe getting up long enough to go to a nice restaurant or watch tv – they’d look suprised, and somewhat gleeful… “that’s an AWESOME idea for a vacation!”

anyway. this summer’s staycation just doesn’t feel subversive and cool anymore, possibly because i am now compelled to call it by its lame new name, instead of referring to it as “sexy time.” so… bed, tv, restaurants and gourmet cooking for the (thunderstormy) first part of the week, and some fly-fishing in the driftless area of the state at the middle/end of the week, while teaching ourselves swedish in the car from instructional cds in preparation for next summer’s flyfishing trip… not that swedish trout need us to speak swedish, but how the hell else are our vacation (or, just to round out the lameness, i could call it “vay-cay.” then i could stand in line for a few hours to get into a hip club!) home videos going to qualify as authentic swedish porn?

we watched “the happening” tonight. don’t make the same mistake.

don’t get me wrong. it was, in many way, utterly brilliant. the man knows his bergman.

but motherfucker; the movie was like one big cheap shot at our collective post-9/11 fears.

also? if the whole premise of your movie is a scientific explanation, it wouldn’t hurt to be a scientist. because emotionally-charged science-themed word salad? lame.

you have been warned.