i tell you, i need to have this shopping party thingy so i can sleep through the night again. for the past two weeks, i'm up like i have a crying baby in the other room and, well, this shit just has to stop. i'm tired and wired at the same time.

it's a good excitement, except for this waking up. i am revved up, inspired, and scared, but mostly in a good way. fear is ok if it's motivating and this is. i am conversely worried about no people coming and too many people coming. having too much stuff, and not nearly enough. it's a wait and see little game.

in the mean time, i'm up here at 4:25, wanting to slumber, but feeling like there is a firecracker inside me. plus we have mice again and i live in fear of those little critters.

ok,turning this off and counting sheep (wearing jewelry from the sale).

wink

thursday is my little party shopping thingy, as i've come to call it. i'm excited, nervous and tired. overall, however, i'm proud of myself that i'm doing something that's a step toward a goal, a dream, a new career. proud that i'm just taking the dive. here's to it. fingers crossed. i've already succeeded.

head case

i hate being sick. i've been sick a lot in my life. and every time i get sick again, i feel like there has been no time in between and i have always been sick. of course, this is simply not true, but it feels true. and sometimes, that's really all that matters.

brrrrrrr.....and it's only october

i can't believe that i really grew up in new england and have remained here to this day--50 years-- because i tell you i was supposed to be raised in the tropical waters of hawaii, the palm tree filled neighborhoods of st. john, the perfect year round weather pattern of santa barbara. I WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THE DAUGHTER OF A SNOWMAN. i hate the cold. i hate it like it's hitler, charles manson, GEORGE BUSH. there is nothing, really, honest not one thing i like about it.

and another thing, we have way more cold here in new england than we have warm. it's not some even split, you know. it used to be when i was a kid, but not anymore. now it's like summer for july and august and winter from november to april. really, this is the truth. this is what we're living with here in this god forsaken part of the country, that everybody is always all, "but don't you just love the seasons?" and i'm all like, "uh, well, nope i could really just live without them if you could just give me more than two months of warmth."

in good times and when i want to potato peel your nose.

i tell you that being married is the toughest job there is. forget housewife, the army, being a mother, a proctologist, marriage beats 'em all. it's a beast, fraught with every kind of drama there is. there are days, like this one, that i want to pack my stuff up and leave (i'm not because it would be a big job). i want to grab the man i've been married to for 23 years and smack him upside the head in an effort to let him know how intellectually impaired he is, how TOTALLY FUCKING STUPID everything about HIM IS.

i'm mad. my stomach is gurgling with anger. and yet, at some point, it will be over and we will be better. but for today, i can't really imagine when. and for now, that will have to just do.

it all depends on where you started

my friend claudia, who i have so much in common with, i could be related to, did a song and dance the other day about this ridiculously successful woman who is married to a mega gazillionaire she used to go out with. "if i hadn't been so needy, so whiney, so immature, such a total and complete mess," i could have been her," claudia said while sitting on the picnic table at the dog park. "if you had a head and body transplant you could have been her," i said.

i can fall fall into this trap too, wishing i were someone else, someone else who seems to be made of entirely different genegic material and is able to turn every damn thing she touches with perfectly manicured fingers into gold, but the thing is, i'm not that. i'm me. and me grew up with a secret alcoholic father who did his best to bestow me with a self-confidence so low, an ant can't crawl under it. an uber loving mom who never left the man who stole my optimism and nobody helping me to create a positive, exciting adulthood. no, i don't have my friend deb's ability to do 100 things in a day, nicole's skill at running two houses and a family of 3 with the aplomb of a dancer for the ny ballet, toni's keen and innate competence when it comes to all things home, sarah's capacity for having a killer bod and a killer career. but i didn't start where any of them started. i started in a whole other place, and anything i've done in my life, i have had to sort of do on my own. i have to measure my success, however minimal, by the distance i've traveled, not by comparing myself to martha stewart.

so, claudia, think about your beginnings, which you've told me were not optimal and then figure out how many times around the track you had to go before you even got to the starting gate, and then let's talk about that woman and all the other ones like her. nope, you aren't her, but that doesn't mean you're not just as amazing.

sort of funny, NOT

i can be pretty funny. just today i was cracking up the dog park with my dead-on imitation of rachel zoe and tay. i can write a downright well-timed, belly laugh email. but here on this blog, i notice that my funny bone just doesn't put out. i wonder if it's that this is not a public blog, just a sort of journal kind of thing for me and if it were really broadcast out there for the world to see, i'd be going for the comedy gold, but with nobody to impress, i am less likely to go for funny and more likely to hash out stuff in depth, in a serious, way.

it doesn't make me laugh, or practice my comedic timing. how come i am not trying to crack myself up?

School supplies

You can feel it, in the morning and right after dinner. It's the cool tinge in the air that means next week my kids go back to school and September declares itself. September, that month that's sort of like January--the start of a new year, with new resolutions and pointy pencils and good intentions. Well, I want my pencil box and I want to do something good, learn something new, have something for myself that's creative. I can feel the longing in the pit of my stomach. It's trapped butterfly. A great idea that's just out of reach. I know I'm smart enough to set it free, but somehow or other I always feel mired in quicksand. I want to get out of the ditch this year though. This year my pencil box is going to go to good use.

the organizationally challenged

we, the organizationally challenged are like alcoholics. we carry with us (besides way too much shit) the inability (without constant surveillance or self-talk) to create homes where you can find the gift certificate from your mother, the shin guards for your kid's soccer game and in the worst cases, the birth control. we live in a state of continual frustration because while we crave structure and the systematic ability to put things away, we are helpless in the face of too damn much stuff.

Camp for the Parents

Jake and Ally are both at sleepaway camp. Read: parents are having sex on the couch.

I suppose this is a sliver of a glimpse into what it might be like to have the nest emptied out. We had a big salad for dinner last night with all sorts of good stuff in it. Stuff the kids would whine and complain about, after demanding to know where the rest of dinner was. This morning when I woke up, I did not hear Ally yelling to come into her room (despite the fact that she has two perfectly good legs attached to her ass that could easily walk her to our room, so as not to wake up her brother), or an argument between the two darling siblings about a) the wearing of a shirt b) the walking of the dog c) any mundane, senseless topic where two people could choose opposing positions. I screamed to my husband, "Do you hear that?" To which he asked, "What?" To which I replied, "The QUIET."

Tonight we're going to the movies. Maybe we'll have sex on the kitchen counter (last night it was the new couch). And Friday I'll be ready to pick Ally up at camp (or maybe I won't be).

it's not easy

growing up with an alcoholic father, an alcoholic father who i didn't know was an alcoholic was a little like the whole santa claus myth. we all know that santa doesn't exist, yet we lie, quite elaborately about him and how he's watching each of us to make sure we're good so we can get a bunch of loot on the birthday of Christ (who was born of immaculate conception, BECAUSE YOU KNOW, THAT HAPPENS EVERYDAY).

an alcoholic comes in many forms and flavors. my personal alcoholic came in the form of an extremely intelligent man who read the new york times and new yorker cover to cover every day of his life, who loved theater and classical music and used to ground me for a week for not putting the prell shampoo cap back on the bottle and would call me "a piece of shit" the way other dad's called their daughters "princess."

ah, yes, it was a lovely life. amidst the boyfriends and extra curricular activities was a girl terrified of what mood her dad might be in when she came home from school. he might be happy, or more than likely, he might want to pick a fight. he could be sleepy (you tend to fnod out after drinking too much) or in a rage about some insignificant event (like the fact that my mother cooked me a burger because i couldn't stomach the fish, or liver or tongue she'd made). he might be docile (although unlikely) or just mean, terribly, terribly mean and punitive. it was hard to know exactly what to expect, but what i did know, what i could be sure of, was that my father could be relied upon to be inconsistent. and my nervous system, i'm afraid has never recovered.

i don't do particularly well with those who aren't relatively predictable, or with being unjustly accused of things i didn't do, or being called names, like one of my dad's favorites: "stupid." i shudder when someone attacks me for no reason, or yells because they feel like it. i'm inclinced to want to run away when i encounter someone with these sorts of social skills. that's how i managed to live out my childhood, running away from the big bad wolf, into a world of sadness and silence. the divide between us became as wide as the distance between the earth and the sun and before i knew it, i had grown up and left home, having never been able to connect with the man who made me. and yet, i can't exorcise him. i can't seem to forget him or evict him. and what would be really helpful would be to throw him out of here on his ass.

FEBRUARY SUCKS

Next February I will not be in Boston. I will not be putting on fourteen layers of polartec, followed by sixteen layers of down, big furry boots and a hat that makes me look like I have a bigger nose than I actually have. I will not be cold. I will not be slipping on ice. Noooooo. I will be sipping on ice. Because I will be in the Caribbean somewhere a fruity cocktail with an umbrella stirrer in one hand and a trashy magazine in another hand and I will be baring my less than bikini beautiful body to the sun.

I will be. i promise. Just watch.

Enough, Already

I feel like we're living in Alaska with that Tina Fey impersonator. It's snowing again. Again.