Not about being able to touch your toes
Today feels bittersweet—I’ve written my last post for Feel More Better, and I can’t believe it’s been two years.
I’m a different person now than I was when I started writing there. But I still believe in their mission and think this idea of “finding your happy” may sound silly/light/fluffy, but is actually the key to everything. I’m so honored I got to be a part of it, and I know they’ll keep on spreading love, challenging stereotypes, and calling bullshit where appropriate.
As for me, I’ll keep on working on myself, but I’m grateful for the lessons I’m learning, however slowly (I am a slow learner when it comes to this growing-as-a-person thing). The key, I think, is flexibility. Come on over and tell me what you’ve learned, one last time?
Clean up, move on
By all accounts, 2013 is so far turning out a lot better than 2012. Of course, the bar was set pretty low, but still. I know January 1st is arbitrary as Markers Of Life is concerned. That didn’t stop Otto and me from looking forward to that flip of the calendar page as if our lives depended on it. And with nearly 1/12 of this year behind us, we remain hopeful that this year is Better.
And it is. We are all trucking along in our various paths towards some kind of normalcy. The days of Constant High Alert, Holy Shit The Sky Continues To Fall are over. Maybe.
What I am learning about myself is that I have mastered the art of faking it until I make it, and also that time is helping me learn the fine art of compartmentalization. I used to be a perpetual waterfall of emotions, unable to separate out the current moment from the hundred (thousand) that came before, forever trying to suss out the appropriate emotional state for THIS moment without the baggage of the rest. read more…
Road to nowhere
Is there anything better than a Saturday? We can sleep in! We have the whole day to do… whatever! But if you are Otto, the only thing that’s better than a random Saturday is the Saturday when the Camper and RV show is in town. Woooooo!
Um. What? You don’t get all excited for the Camper and RV show? It’s EXCITING!
[Full disclosure: It is not terribly (read: at all) exciting to me. But it is VERY exciting to Otto, and generally the kids enjoy it as well. Fancy campers have a variety of interesting things inside of them, and that’s in addition to the number of small spaces where one determined Monkey-child might wedge himself and then holler “I BET YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE I AM!” Also, it’s an entire expo thing, which means there’s food. And one of the booths there sells CAKE! A slice is as big as a child’s head. I know some children who really enjoy cake. Me, I really enjoy Otto. I don’t think I’d ever, say, head to the Camper and RV show all on my own, but I am happy to go to make Otto happy, and also because he is adorable when he sees something he finds intriguing.]
So! We got up! We ate breakfast! We made ourselves presentable and then we got in the car and headed Atlantaward. “How long will it take to get there?” asked Monkey.
“About an hour,” answered Otto, and that’s when the ominous, foreshadowing music would’ve started up, if only we hadn’t been busy listening to “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” read more…
Fun with Siri and a teenager*
I can’t remember if I mentioned that I finally upgraded to an iPhone 5 from my previous dinosaur-era model (deductible business expense, wooo!), which means I am only recently learning the wonders of Siri. Siri and I have a somewhat difficult relationship, although nowadays if I say to her, “Siri, what’s my name?” she will gamely respond, “Your name is Miriam. But because we are friends, I get to call you Mir.” (I don’t know if we’re truly friends, but I appreciate that Siri knows how to ingratiate herself.)
It’s true that this phone means I am forever feeling my age; last night at play rehearsal I tried to record something and somehow completely screwed it up (because pushing the big red RECORD button is too hard…? I don’t know if I didn’t record it or if I somehow didn’t save it), and a younger, smarter cast member was kind enough to email her recording to me. But it’s also true that I am grateful to technology, and this phone in particular, because Chickadee communicates best with her thumbs, and I am trying to keep up.
It used to be that when she was texting me and I was in the car, she would get annoyed when I didn’t answer, and then my entire drive would be punctuated by dings and whistles as she typed “BEEP BEEP!” fifty gajillion times in a row. Because THAT’S not annoying. Thanks to Siri, I can now text while I drive. read more…
The olden days and all kinds of families
Hippie School is working on some sort of family history/family tree/civil rights mashup project right now—at least, I think they are. Monkey tends to be a little obtuse when it comes to telling me about what’s actually happening at school. Somewhere in his brain, the fact that I oversee his HOME homeschool days gives him carte blanche to tell me only select snippets about what happens when he’s over at Hippie School. As a result, if I am to believe his version of events, on a regular day at Hippie School all that happens is: He plays D&D with a couple of his buddies, someone does something wrong which Monkey then feels the need to correct (and he either does so with self-righteous gusto OR he proudly restrains himself but has to vent to me about how hard that was), he forgets to eat his lunch, and someone builds something fantastic out of found objects. So, uh, I always assume I’m missing some pieces of the story.
[Sidebar: I do not mind the whole “What did you do today?” “Nothing much,” interaction, actually. It’s so developmentally appropriate! Hooray! And I do have my ways of finding out what’s actually happening there, and I feel confident it’s not all Lord of the Flies and they really are doing work, so whatever.]
In general, Hippie School doesn’t include homework. But this past week, it did. And I could’ve told you ahead of time that this was going to be entertaining. read more…
Pssst, pass it down
Today I climbed into the wayback machine and spent some time fondly remembering all of those notes I wrote during classes in middle and high school. I view it as a necessary stage of my adolescence, really, the Writing Notes stage.
Nowadays, of course, kids only have the put-their-heads-down-and-text-all-day-long stage. I think it’s different. Not necessarily bad, mind you, but different, and maybe just a little too quick. Then again, I’m a known curmudgeon, so what do I know?
Well, I know that I’m over at Feel More Better today, and I kind of wish teens would try writing notes, again. It probably won’t happen, but I dunno… there was some magic in those scribbles I just don’t think you can find on a text phone.
I’m awkward, and maybe a liar, but not a hipster
About two years ago, I went to a new optical place to have my eyes checked and to get new glasses. Some quick math reveals that I had already been living in Georgia for… erm… three and a half years, by then, and it was my first eye exam in this state. Prior to then, I’d just assumed my prescription was fine and not bothered with an exam. Oops.
But by the time I went in, I was having trouble seeing. I knew I needed an updated prescription. So off I went, and I was introduced to the wonder that was the ocular pressure testing wand and I got fitted for daily contact lenses and it was all very exciting. If you go back and look at that post, you’ll notice that I made absolutely no mention of having my eyes dilated at that exam. This will become important, later.
Anyway. A year after that last appointment, Dr. Eyeball’s office developed an unrequited crush on me. At first, postcards arrived in the mail. “Hi, Mir! We hope you’ve had a great year! We miss you here at Optical Place and you’re due for an exam! WHY NOT CALL TODAY YOU HORRIBLE PERSON?!” (I threw the cards out, of course, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they said.) Then there were emails. And finally, phone messages. read more…
I am old and inappropriate
So I’m doing The Vagina Monologues again this year, and while my father would insist that as a kid/teen I used to get cast in a play and have the whole script memorized the next day (this is an exaggeration), the older I get, the harder it is for me to memorize lines. Clearly my brain is failing. And the piece I’m in is a group round-robin style thing, so I am really struggling to get each of these single-lines-between-other-people’s-single-lines down before we’re supposed to be off-book in a few days. And the piece is SAD and HEAVY and HORRIFYING, so it’s not exactly a joyfest.
On the other hand, I have a short paragraph in the big intro to the show which IS funny, and I don’t know what it is—maybe my reaction to having such a Serious Piece later on, or that I am actually a 12-year-old boy on the inside—but that was not only a snap to memorize, I find myself riffing on possible responses to my favorite line way more often than is probably normal. The line is, “In the first place, it’s not so easy to even find your vagina.” Which… what?? So far my favorite made-up-for-my-own-amusement responses include:
A) That’s what she said.
B) Shall we call 1-800-THE-MISSING?
C) Let me Google that for you!
I really should not be allowed out into the world unsupervised.
Aquaphobia
One of the things I found myself doing yesterday (and several days prior)—before I wrote about the difference between Young Blogging Me and the current Old And Smarter But Fatter And Crankier Me—was going back and reading some of my old posts. I don’t do this very often. And usually, you know, I remember stuff I wrote about before (duh), but occasionally a post is a COMPLETE surprise (read: repressed memory), and very often, something falls into the realm of “Oh, I remember that, but until I read this, I had kinda-sorta forgotten.”
So it was just yesterday that I found myself rereading various posts detailing The Great Flood of 2006, wherein my basement flooded not once, but TWICE, and I came down with bronchitis and was convinced I had mold in my lungs from all of the associated cleanup, because that’s logical and also I am a little bit of a hypochondriac. Know what our lovely home here in Georgia doesn’t have? A BASEMENT. That makes it my most favorite house ever, by the way.
Anyway, that’s preface to what I’ll tell you next, because yes, I was a little… uhhhh… primed with memories of water disasters. read more…
Shut up, hindsight
One of the interesting side effects of having cut waaaaaaaay back on working and marketing myself last year is that I am no longer a Hot Internet Commodity. Bloggers are a dime a dozen, after all, and the thing is, I always had really mixed feelings about that whole Hot Internet Commodity thing, anyway. So now I’m doing all of this Restructuring and Goal-Setting and Planning For The Future and blah blah blah (wake up! I’m getting to a point here!) and trying to decide whether I even WANT to “raise my visibility” to where it used to be.
Even writing that out makes me want to punch myself in the face. I never did any of this because I wanted to Be Someone. I think a lot of people do it to gain some sort of fame/notoriety, but I also think more people than you might guess are more like me—there’s a love of storytelling, an impulse to write, and an oft-whispered wish that mostly, you are just normal, and therefore, forgettable.
So next week I’m going to do an Interview Thing, and I don’t do a lot in the way of actual on-camera stuff, EVER, and I told myself I should do this thing because it’s good practice for me and will give me another recent something to add to the resume as I ramp back up, work-wise, but over the last two days I realized that’s not why I want to do it. I want to do it because I feel like I need to do some penance. read more…