OK, please tell me something shameful you do so I can feel better about my subpar parenting (and chickening). Pretty please?

A ha ha ha ha ha.

Well! Let me tell you a funny story. For a few weeks in January, my blog was getting a crazy amount of hits. Like, not exploding or viral, but crazy for me. Like, there was an extra zero (sometimes TWO zeroes) tacked on to my daily pageviews. It was strange, especially because my commenting and emails didn’t increase AT ALL. Just the pageviews, and I checked against wordpress and Google Analytics and they all agreed, “Crazy stuff!”

And this is when I thought, “Maybe I COULD be a smashing blog success!” And that is when I started to get really sad. Coincidence!

Except that I realized that while my goal of wanting to be a writer full-time is lofty and fun and YES, very very common, it is not my ONLY goal in life. I also want to have coworkers and work with people (in-person!) and get dressed up and leave the house on a regular basis, and not just to get the mail! And I want a steady income that is not dependent on the willy-nilly thoughts of the Internet or book sales or agents or what-have-you. And I want to work with kids, and not just my own. And I want to make fun of the teenager who was walking around wearing short short overalls (REALLY) while it was snowing out. I want to do that EVERY DAY.

And that is when I thought, “I do not want to be a writer full-time! I want to be a normal type person! Hallelujah!” And then I started feeling better! Coincidence! (This is not to say that writers can’t be normal-type people, but that *I* couldn’t be a normal-type person if I were writing full-time, successfully.)

My pageviews also unceremoniously dropped to low low lower than ever before levels, and while before I think this would have made me feel like the muckiest muck, now it has ZERO EFFECT ON MY PSYCHE. Coincidence?

So here is where I realized that I am a goal-oriented person, and that I feel much better when I have an achievable and totally within-my-control goal (unlike, “Sell my book to big publishing house!” or “get ten zillion pageviews today!” or “have another baby!” as those depend on uncontrollable factors). If I have a goal of, “Get a graduate degree in teaching,” or “get a library job,” well, I could DO SOMETHING about that stuff. Unlike many of the writing full-time goals. Plus, I would be able to talk to real live people!

So that is why, YES, I still am going to go to my writing conference and finish my book and cross my fingers that I can get it published, because that is a big, big dream of mine, but NO, I am not going to make it my entire world. It gives me a new perspective on people who have been successful in the blog world. I used to be jealous, but now I feel LUCKY to have discovered this before getting ensnared in something I don’t even want. Who knew luck looked like this?

I wore this today. This was just taken after dinner, so please excuse the hamburger and broccoli bloat, the bad lighting, the second chin, all of my makeup being worn away and flat hair. Even so, I felt supremely cute in it. (But looking at the photo, next time I might add a belt.)

(Oh, right, I forgot: Dress is thrifted, sweater is H&M, boots are Remont Dorndorf.)

Thing the second:

Thank you for all your very nice and helpful (seriously, this internet thing is HELPFUL) comments on my Life Has A Purpose woes. They made me feel much, much better. Sadly, I deleted the post because I made the mistake of mentioning jobby things, which is kind of dumb. That is the first rule of the Internet, isn’t it? Don’t mention jobby things. Anyhow, I am going to pursue both looking into part-time librarian gigs and getting a second Master’s in teaching. Yo, and a lot of you are teachers. That’s pretty darn awesome. (Excuse my lack of swearing. I blame my parents. I just can’t do it!) (Except when I’m really angry with Gregg.) (Or a jar of pickles.)

Thing the third:

I got a fortune cookie yesterday that said, “You will be successful in business ventures.” I usually get non-fortune cookies. You know, the ones that are just statements? Like, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Which is both untrue and NOT A FORTUNE. I think it’s the first fortune I’ve liked in a while.

Thing the fourth:

I gave up sugar for 30 days again (I did a year or so ago, and blogged about it, but meh, you don’t want to read it so I’m not going to link to it. Trust me, your life is more complete without reading it.) Except I ate four Girl Scout cookies today. And a weird gummy thing from the kids’ candy jar that may very well have been liquid ebola for how it tasted. Mmm.

Thing the fifth:

My pal, Allie, sent me a link to the most awesome card ever ever.

Available here.

I don’t think I can top that, so tell me about some of your Things instead, especially if they are about extremely frustrating fortune cookie fortunes. Or Ira Glass jokes.

Can you see it? The color is a lot more subtle than I wanted, but the stylist assured me that it would fade to a lighter blue and become more and more obvious. I think she was afraid I wouldn’t want it to be SUPER! BLUE! even though I totally did want it that way, and I told her so. I think perhaps I was not her typical clientele, so she buried it under my black hair a bit. Even so, I still love it and can’t wait for it to lighten up (it will only last about 6 weeks, she said) and then perhaps I can try something bolder. Like magenta.  

But then! Then I remembered that this weekend I’m getting my hair dyed blue! And that I have outfit posts and food posts and book posts lined up! And I want to share them with you! So…I think I *will* take a blogging break, but perhaps I’ll just post photos here now and again for the next week or two and keep comments closed. I will also likely still be on twitter and facebook. I can’t give up social media completely. Never. I will also likely be stalking you on your blogs still, just not commenting to save a little bit of time.

Anyhow, I know it’s not like you’re hanging on my every word here or in the comments on your own blogs, but just wanted to say: I’m going away for a very little bit, and I will be back soonish. Who are we kidding, I’ll be back this weekend to show you my blue! hair!

This is what he looked like a few months ago:

This is what he looks like today:

I suppose a kind, cutesy way of saying it would be to tell you that he’s a little bit pudgy. We don’t mind a little pudge in this house; we’re not exactly sitting around recalling our awesome spin class or the finish times of our marathons while sipping our collard green smoothies. We might be the kind of people to have a soft middle and a jar of bacon grease in the fridge that we put in everything. So it’s not that we’re upset that he’s become a round butterball of a dog. It’s that, well, accompanied by the pudge, Malcolm has a singular interest.

For instance, when looking at the fully stocked fridge, he says to us,

(Of course he doesn’t really say that. We say that for him. We’re the kind of people who make our animals talk.)

Here are some other things we say for him (which are, by the way, completely true).

So, the time has come to put Malcolm on a diet. We know it’s cruel, because it’s not like he can pull out a good novel and a Skinny Cow ice cream bar to distract himself while we eat dinner every night, but we’ve got to do it. He’s a dog obsessed.

So this is what it’s going to be like every single day, whenever I open up the fridge, or grab a mixing bowl, or the children drop some food on the floor that I quickly sweep away:

And I’m okay with that, because there’s no point to having pets if you can’t anthropomorphize them while slowly torturing them, right?

Here is where I would tell you about my vacation and how great and awesome it was, but honestly, my vacation was kind of meh. It could have been better. Hawaii: kind of overhyped, especially if you hate driving. But the weather was fantastic, at least.

What I’ve been thinking about writing about for the last few days is Group Therapy, or as we Group Therapy Veterans refer to it simply, Group. Group arguably saved my sanity and probably my life, but I kind of hated it. Hate it, present tense. And I also love it. I don’t know why I keep thinking about it, except that maybe it’s the beginning of Lent (which, if you are not a Lent Observer, is the time before Easter when you are supposed to think about Jesusy suffering and sacrifice et cetera)  and also because of pre-conceived notions of how Group is great and also Vacation Is Great, but really not.

Disclaimer: I guess this is where I launch into a post about God, kind of, which is not my normal thing, but today is not a normal day, and I will take no offense if you don’t read it, but if you’re scared I’m going to preach to you, trust me, I’m not that kind of a girl, which I hope you already know. You need not worry I will push my beliefs on you. I’m going to tell you about them, but I will also happily believe that you are right and I am wrong. End Disclaimer.

This half has to do with not meeting (vacation) expectations, but also has to do with the small personal crisis I had on vacation, in my head, that I resolved on my own. My small personal crisis was of the “what the hell am I doing with my life?” variety, and more specifically, “So You Want To Be A Writer? So What!” variety. I kept thinking about how being a writer doesn’t help anyone or anything in the world, not like being a teacher or a doctor or a social worker does, and maybe I should aspire to be something that matters instead of wanting to be a writer, as if I could control my desires in a specific direction.

I will cut through the existentialist navel-gazing and tell you I got over my small personal crisis by remembering how the best thing I can do is be happy because happiness spreads more happiness, and if writing makes me happy, to do it, because the world already has enough miserable people in jobs that matter, so I would not be filling a void. Of course this begs the question as to how I came to this conclusion.

This all loops back to Group and how I currently Hate It So, So Much even though it’s years behind me because last night I lay (lie? crap is my grammar poor) in bed listening to the older boy cough and cough because he had the flu on vacation, and there I was laying (lying?) in bed and praying to God to please make him better, which is kind of a waste of a prayer because OF COURSE he will get better, but it doesn’t matter because I at least have a limitless supply of these desperate 2am prayers. Group made me a worrier like this, thinking that my kid coughing from a flu-relic at 2am is a sign that he has pneumonia or cancer or something else and THAT’S why he’s so skinny OH MY GOD how did I not notice and please don’t let him have cancer and die God he’s only six years old. Group did this to me because it focused very specifically on this one notion: you are not alone in your suffering.

Which was great at first! There are so many other people who have been through something similar, or something worse, or many things worse, than what I have been through, but it also showed me that life is tenuous and dangerous and unpredictable and that good people have bad things happen to them and sometimes bad people have nothing happen to them and am I really supposed to believe in God when this happens all of the time, every day, and here is my proof from all these women in Group? Shouldn’t I be an athiest by now?

And here is where I tell you that I have tried really, really hard to be an athiest. Or at least a respectable agnostic! Believing in God really makes no sense, just like wanting to be a writer really makes no sense, but I find I have very little control of these things. I have never not believed in God, despite all of the completely shitty things that have happened to me, and I don’t think that I can change my mind about these things. I could sooner be a Republican. (Wait, no, I couldn’t.)

There are some things I have tenuous beliefs about: the afterlife (even though I am on paper a Catholic, I kind of don’t know about this heaven business, and I definitely don’t believe in hell); that everyone who believes their religion is the One True Way is actually correct; that God cares if you are Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or Athiest. That kind of sums it up for me in terms of belief, that it doesn’t really matter what we believe in the grand scheme of things, as long as we try to be good people. We don’t even need to succeed. It’s all in the trying.

Which makes no sense. Here I am, telling you that Group made me an awful worrier because I now know over twenty good women who have been brutally raped or beaten or abused, most of them more than once, all of them forever harmed by the violence of other people, and it makes me suspicious about the world and whether it makes any sense and if it isn’t just a chaotic tumble that keeps me up at 2am wondering when the next bad thing is about to happen. And then I go and say that I can’t stop believing in God and the goodness of all of the people in the world trying to make it better.

But I think because of all of this is why I can’t stop believing in God. Because there are all these people in the world trying to make it better, for seemingly no reason at all. It IS a chaotic tumble of sadness and cruelty and some people’s six year old kids do get cancer or pneumonia from what starts out as a flu-relic cough and of course that makes no sense, and some people have awful abuses done unto them and some people seem to never, ever, get what they want, what they deserve and there are people senselessly killed or starved every single day.

And we should really all let go and take what we need for ourselves and not worry about anyone else. It should be Lord of the Flies. AND YET. And yet we don’t. It isn’t. We think about other people. We make meals for friends. We give money. We smile at strangers. We tell jokes. We volunteer. Even though we’re all going to die and maybe there’s no reward afterwards, maybe there never was, and there never will be, and does it really matter if there is or isn’t? It’s that we’re here and we’re trying in spite of the badness, BECAUSE of the badness, to make it a little bit more livable and tolerable and pleasant and happy.

It is seemingly for no reason that we do all of this. Let’s face it: there is probably no pot of gold at the rainbow for us, and most of us don’t expect a reward for it. That’s what I learned from Group. There is this awful, terrible world out there, and you have all been through the worst nightmares ever, and almost none of us give up hope that things will get better. And we don’t just do it for ourselves, we do it for each other, and that’s the real reward: to make someone else a little happier or more hopeful, too, in whichever way we can’t help being happy: writing or cooking or reading or teaching or doctoring or just being.

So Group, and Lent, and Suffering, and you all, you make me hopeful. You’re all trying so hard, and it’s working. And that’s why I can’t not believe, at least not today.

In the meantime, Slauditory agreed to write a guest post. You all should be reading her if you’re not. She does book reviews, style photos, hilarious dating stories, and more. Oh, and she’s extremely talented and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. (!!!!)

Mardi Gras means something different for everyone. For tourists, it’s a time to let loose, to drink on the street, and to show what their mamas gave them to old dudes on the street. For locals, it’s a time to connect with community and party on the streets–our streets. For me, it’s about glitter and glamour, crossing boundaries and disrupting routines.

The parades trundle by, the neon lights casting shadows on the riders’ faces as they lean out of the floats and grin at the crowd. The horses shove their noses over the barriers and children dance back, laughing, but a little scared. The marching bands send vibrations through every body; the drums catch the beat of our hearts and the tubas rumble in our bellies. Like the smoke from the flambeaux, wildness hangs in the air.

More than ten years ago, I fell in love at a parade. Endymion was rolling. My best friend and I were supposed to go to the parade together and to our friends’ party on the route afterward. For whatever reason, she had to cancel. She asked another friend of ours to go with me, since I was seventeen and I didn’t want to go to the parade by myself. He agreed.

My aunt relaxed and styled my hair that day. I felt so pretty. (This was before my natural hair revolution.) When D. came to pick me up, my hair flowed down my back. Strands of it floated in the breeze from his rolled-down car windows as we sped toward the parade route. The night was so warm that I could wear a tank top. I chattered away at him the whole time. When we got the parade, he took my hand, saying something like, “I don’t want us to get separated or for you to get lost.”

I don’t remember the specifics of what he said because right that second, my heart cracked open and love rushed throughout my body. I was buoyant with love. I didn’t notice the elbows, the leering drunks, or the lit cigarettes in my path. All I saw was him, my friend, the man I wanted to make mine one day.

I surprised myself with this; feelings had been piling up inside of me for months, yet I only noticed them when they broke free. The lawlessness of the night allowed it to happen.

Not that night, but months later, I made him mine. That relationship ended many years ago, but it was brilliant and magical, just like the night when I realized I loved him. Everything started with a break from the ordinary.

When I think about Carnival time, I think about leaving ordinariness behind for a few weeks. I also think about falling in love. The weeks before Easter are rife with possibilities. I can’t wait to feel the electricity in the air again.

Today’s guest poster is Hilarity in Shoes, who pretty much has the best dating (and non-dating) stories on the Internet.

Even though I’m from the middle of nowhere, I’m not a country girl. True, some of the people I grew up with have puzzlingly incongruous southern accents. Many take the first day of deer season off from work or school to go drink in the woods obey man’s elemental call to provide for his family. A couple of towns over, kids ride tractors to school. But I grew up in a subdivision, with a collie. I could walk to Thrift Drug and buy TigerBeat and steal lip balm (or vice versa, depending.) I was a town girl–albeit a crappy factory town.

And yet. I really wanted to be Laura Ingalls. I read all the books and watched the show religiously. I made my grandma teach me how to crochet (none of us knows how to knit) and begged my mom for turnips because the ones they ate from the root cellar were so crisp and delicious. Long before it was punk rock to do so, I coveted pickles and preserves. I used my babysitting money to buy piccalilli from the Amish market because…because. (Don’t even get me started on my obsession with the Amish.) I was an agrarian pretender.

This homesteading thing has really caught on in the ensuing years, as you may have heard on the internet. It’s hip to channel the Ingalls’. Mason jars are fetish objects. If you’ve never had an egg that’s still warm from its hen, or drunk raw milk, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT REAL PLEASURE IS.

And so, I was excited when my aunt and her family moved out to the country and started acquiring livestock. They have two horses. They have many dogs and cats. They had a couple of goats, one of which was a “meat goat”* named Ricky Bobby that I suggested they re-christen Ricky Kebabby. (*Meat goat is a horrifying phrase, I know. It’s something to do with 4-H.)

And they have chickens. Fun ones, that lay pretty pastel eggs.

Now, two background stories.

One: In fifth grade I was a crossing guard. That meant I got to come to school early one morning per week to pick up my special orange vest, and, on cold days, elaborately nurse a cup of hot chocolate “to warm me up” during first period in front of the other children who just had to shiver.

We were raising chicks that year. We’d started out with eggs, placing them in an incubator in the back of the room, monitoring the temperature fastidiously every day and waiting for them to hatch. I couldn’t wait to see the baby hatchlings fuzzling around their tank in the back of the classroom, cheeping adorably. I was a tenderhearted child.

So we waited and waited for those eggs to crack, and then one day I came in to get my orange nerd vest and they had! The incubator was full of toddling chicks, fuzzy and cheeping and everything! I ran out to find someone to share the news with, and came back just in time to see the slightly creepy janitor reach in and kill one of the wee fuzzballs because had (ALLEGEDLY) been born deformed.

Much wailing ensued.

Two: Well, this is less of a story and more just plain background info, but birds HATE me. City birds especially–they are always dive-bombing my head, trying to pluck out some of my hair for their nests. I can’t explain why this is true, only that it IS, just like it’s true that streetlights go out when I walk underneath them. I think my hair has super-electrical qualities. Anyway, I’m terrified of every feathered thing that flies. I have dropped to my knees on downtown streets, covering my head and shrieking to avoid birds when they come after me. (Can you believe I’m single?) I accidentally flipped a table on a bar patio once, scrambling to flee because one flew at me and BRUSHED ME WITH ITS WINGS. ITS CREEPY HORRIBLE DIRTY WINGS.

But, as traumatized as I am by anything that has a beak, I love my family. So when I received an urgent call from my aunt, beseeching me to save her chicks, I knew what I had to do.

It was the day of my baby cousin’s high school graduation. Everyone was at the ceremony, and I had returned to the house to start laying out the food when a vicious thunderstorm started rolling in. Bruise-colored clouds were scudding over the hills when my cell phone rang. The chicks are in their outdoor enclosure–you have to bring them in or they’ll die!

Standing by the pen, I confronted my task. The chicks were beyond the yellow fuzzy phase but not yet dinner-sized. Appetizer-sized, perhaps. Instead of fuzz, they had patchy, downy pinfeathers. They were huddled nervously in the corner as the sky started spitting rain. A knee high fence (chicken wire, obvs) separated us. I steeled myself for the job ahead. I was going to bend over…and sort of reach in and…scoop? kind of?…one teenage chicken at a time into the safety of my arms. I  went for it, and they scattered and re-grouped in another corner. I re-positioned myself and went for it again. Thunder cracked overhead, and still they evaded me. The rain was coming harder now. My aunt had said the chicklets were both fragile and stupid, and could die of exposure or drowning if it rained hard. There were six of them, and one of me. Again I reached, and again they got away.

The chickens were clucking in alarm, and I was getting desperate. I plunged my arms in again, and suddenly both of my hands were full! My euphoria was short-lived though, because I was suddenly flooded with the unholy knowledge of just how disgusting chicken bodies are. Like a bag of knobby wires covered in cheap felt, but with grasping, scaly feet.

A bird in each hand, I froze. The rain was coming steadily, and the safety of the indoor chicken enclosure in the garage was 200 feet away. I could feel the thrum of the birds’ scared little hearts and the vibration of their panicked clucks through my palms. I held my arms stretched as far away from my body as possible. I was going to drop these stupid birds, and ruin the party. Their awful legs scrabbled at the air, and I thought about dim sum. Anthony Bourdain said chicken feet were “pleasingly chewy”. I was going to faint.

Lightning flashed in the sky, and I tucked my chin to my chest and ran clumsily down the hill toward the garage. I was almost there when I saw the most welcome sight I could think of–my aunt and cousins surging up the hill toward the remaining chickens in the pen. We were saved!

The sight they saw was somewhat less reassuring.

(This is where I was supposed to insert the picture my uncle took of me holding two mangy chickens while wearing a party dress. The look on my face is indescribable, equal parts abject horror and blazing relief. It would be awesome if you could see it; it would really tie this whole post together but I’ve asked my aunt for it three times and she won’t reply to my email. THANKS A LOT AMY I SAVED YOUR STUPID CHICKENS AND THIS IS THE THANKS I GET????)

Use your imagination, but it was something like this.

Except I look just like Gisele Bundchen and the chickens were REAL.