Five Days of Everydays, or Blog Bootcamp

It's easy to find a reason to write when things are full-on awesome or terribly bad, or when something ridiculously ridiculous or heart-breakingly sad happens. Trouble is, there hasn't been a part of this day or the last week or the last month that's been any of those things. Instead, today was just a day, last week was just a week, and there were four of 'em in a row before this one and they were all pretty much the same.

The Three Short Drunk People acted as they do: one day sloppy and falling down funny, other days the sweet, weepy poets on the barstool. Some days they passed out early, and other days, they fought sleep well into the night. They brawled and bear-hugged and high-fived and collapsed in hilarious huddles of silly fun. They drove me to distraction; I drove them to school and friends' houses.

The Kid fell into the routine of a new job with shocking normality and when I wasn't wandering the empty house smiling, I was trying to make sense of what remained of the Christmas Shock and Awe. I organized some meetings and strong-armed the school board. I read two essays from The Book for a bunch of people I'd never met and I felt like a rock star when they laughed and didn't point fingers and whisper. I sold two copies at the Indie Bookstore. I'm pretty sure my friend bought them, but still.

It snowed, we shoveled.

Some days I cooked, somedays I called a truce with the stove and the fridge.

The GFYO complained about school, battled homework, and answered a relatively complex math question that stunned nearly everyone.

Bridget caught a cold and never complained.

Rory got sick and skipped soccer.

The Kid got sick, then the GFYO, then me.

On sunny days, I opened windows and hoped for a perfect wind to blow out all the germs.

I fretted about not writing and fretted more about not reading. I wondered what I was missing, and then worried it might be too much. I simmered in my guilt until I realized how plain wasteful of time that was. Instead, I simmered in my laziness. I just rolled around in the slow boil of what life is like, well... what life is like most of the time. I just rolled around in my not too terrible and not too awesomely awesome everydays and did nothing.

I envy all the people who find the witty or the brilliant or the sweet in even the tiniest parts of their everydays and who then do the painful work of turning those things into elegant words and paragraphs nearly every day. It's such discipline to face down the empty page -- especially when inspiration hides behind laundry or a commute or when angst is on the wain or when you wonder if its all been said before. It's muscle and nerve and blind, deaf faith some people have, and I want it.

I need to learn to love nothing. I need to learn to love all of everything. I want to teach myself to make worthwhile what seems so blah or been there to me. I want to drill into the dull and find the nerve of the thing and turn it into letters and words even when I think I shouldn't and especially when I think can't. I want to aim for elegance but truth be told, I'd be happy with a paragraph, maybe two; I just want to try. Everyday.

Didya hear that? I said "everyday." Well, everyday for a week. It's like blog bootcamp.

Monday it begins: my five days of heavy lifting, cavern drilling, funny seeking.

Five Days of Everydays.

(Wanna try too? Lemme know and I'll link you here...)

Making Our Way

CarolynOnline

The Floydster

Voting in Massachusetts...Breaking...

Holla from the home of the biggest non-Haiti news story today!

I have three things to report from the frontlines:

1) My daughter can do an excellent impression of Martha CO-kley who asks us to vote on TOOOS-day.

2) My other daughter finishes nearly every sentence with -- "and I approved this message."

3) I am unplugging my voicemail: STOP CALLING BARACK! Jeez. Get a life, man.

Also: it snowed and then rained today and the turnout was still kinda gigantic at the polls in the Small Town. We have boots for this kind of crap and also, honestly, I think we like it when people talk about us. Especially when that talk doesn't include the words "Brady" or "Sox" or "Dukakis" or wait? Does anyone talk about Massachusetts?

I mean, we WERE the first in the nation to legalize gay marriage and offer comprehensive healthcare coverage for all its citizens (sound familiar?) (thank you Mitt Romney, you Republican you) so I guess it is newsworthy and also truly ironic that ours could be the state to BLOW THAT ALL TO BITS for everyone else. Which kind of makes me ashamed of my great state.

And also: I approved this message.

Things You Can Count On: After The Merry (2)

(continued, from below. yo.)

E) I Love You, I Do: NOW, GO

1) You will pre-stack all the winter clothes and the lunches into tiny mountains for your zombieesque/first-day-back-at-school kids.

2) You will be extra gentle to your sleepy children on that first very dark and cold morning back and try to woo them to life with waffles and extra syrup.

3) You will answer these questions of your husband twice: where's my phone? where's my wallet?

4) You will very calmly and with pudding-like pressure sweetly remind them (all) (at last) of the tick-tick-tocking time.

5) Gotta go guys, you will nearly whisper, all smiley. All calm. Ya gotta go...

6) Guys? Guys? Hey guys!!!

7) Oh fer chrissake.

8) You will slump into the couch with your watery coffee in your suddenly silent house but for the rumble of the dishwasher and the ice falling down into the freezer and you will sigh and look around and wonder: what to do?

F) Oh Allen Wrench, My Allen Wrench

1) You will have giant boxes not because you are packing, but because you are staying put.

2) Which is a very happy thing and also a kind of sad thing. Settling and totally unsettling: as in -- what now? This? More this?

3) In giant boxes come BRAND NEW CHAIRS, chairs you must build yourself but no matter: they are the newness that might make your old place seem... newer? Fresher, that's it.

4) In your haste to recreate your life, reinvest in it, in the same zip code, you will toss the directions and soon regret it.

5) You will step back from your incredibly dumb mistake, swear like a mothertrucker and then trip over the new rug (more newness!) and land smack on your ass, crammed between the giant box and the wall in a very, very unattractive way.

6) You will look around to see if anyone saw, which is ridiculous...

7) You are alone always now in the middle of the day!

8) But there you are, saying "oh effing a" (just like that) and "that really hurt" -- out loud -- to no one.

9) Your thumb and forefinger will bear the purple callused bruises of your tightening, you expert carpentry.

7) You will wonder if you love or hate Allen, he of the wrench fame.

G) They Say It's Your Birthday -- And THEY WON'T STOP SAYING IT

1) January will come to you with inevitable ice and gray and the anti-climactic end of an aggressively happy time and also, your birthday.

2) Your children will find this intensely exciting and hysterical.

3) Why?

4) Maybe, like you, they are noticing the bittersweet passage of time and knowing that soon you will leap into the category where most of the world will see you as "old" or maybe they are just counting on cake and a goody bag.

5) You're pretty sure that's what it is: the cake, the goodies.

6) Meanwhile, your sisters will pitch in on the hysteria: "i can't believe it" they will squeal and your mother will find it all so very shocking and "kind of a miracle" since she is only 50 after all.

7) Truth is, you've been waiting for this day. When you were 29, you told your father you couldn't wait for 40, because you knew that by then you would have gotten it all worked out -- where you would live, how you would live -- and you would be able to look at yourself in the mirror and and know where you were going and...

8) Yeah, you could be deep at 29. And also kind of naive. Maybe.

9) Maybe not.

H) The Goat, She Climbs

1) You will hold the camera up to the mirror and try to see yourself as you are.

2) You will change the "mode" like sixteen times because holy good god: it can't be that bad. Is there a vaseline-on-the-lens mode? You should invent that.

3) You will snap pictures of your face (of you? of you!) on your birthday because once when you were young you said you would be good with that and you can't let that dumb younger you down.

4) Maybe when you were 29 you meant the whole looking-in-the-mirror thing metaphorically? 'Cause: ugh.

5) Fuck it. Click. Click. Click, like a machine gun of confidence, you'll fire. (It will become less self-indulgent than it seems after a while. It will seem like therapy in a way. Like meditation on some theme you forgot.)

6) You will let the pictures sit in the camera.

7) You will instead re-read a manuscript you didn't write but love as if you did and then you will do the harder work of adding one more paragraph to your own.

8) Before the day collides with everyone else's day, you will plug the little camera into the machine and hit "import all."

7) Then you will vacuum, because you're hosting a PTO meeting tonight -- the New Year has begun; let's go! -- and it's a good idea to get ahead of the stampede of Short Drunk People and all the mom mom mom's they'll bring home with them.

8 ) Download done, you'll step back to see, you will literally step back -- there's the big nose, the freckles, the imperfections, some shyness and well, nothing new.

9) Here you are on your 40th birthday as you saw you on this day...

10) You will be okay with it -- that face, this life -- like you said you would be.

11) But despite the fact that your husband's work will keep you (let you?) stay here in this Small Town, you will have no idea where you are going.

10) You will have no idea at all. How awesome is that? Happy Birthday to you, you old hag.

Things You Can Count On: After The Merry (1)

A) The Rubber Band Effect

1) Though you know you stashed those far-too-small-jeans-you'll-fit-into-someday way back into the furthest corner of your drawer, it will shock you that somehow they have landed on the top of your folded laundry.

2) Um? Wha? How'd that happen? you'll think as you peel them off your bod. Weird.

3) Oddly, the new skinny cords you try next must be the old skinny cords....

4) And every striped t-shirt you have seems suddenly on acid -- horizontal stripes going all Dali on you, stretching and bulging where they never did before.

5) You will take a deep breath, put your big girl panties on (in more ways than one) and check the tag on the jeans.

6) Oh shit.

7) Just as the morning after (everythingyouate) always comes, so do your rubber bands -- one looped around a button, one through a button hole -- and sweet relief, you can carry on.

B) The Bomb that Blows and Blows and Blows

1) You will bag up trash.

2) You will bag up trash again.

3) You will find heaps of trash outside your kitchen door.

4) You will shake your fists at the heavens -- damn you toy packaging maker people!

5) You will never have enough batteries, because someone has thrown them out with the trash.

C) Santa Still Sees You, Suckers

1) The sugarplummish of your kids will quit about 48 hours after The Best Day of Their Lives.

2) Your kids fights will not only begin again, but be re-charged -- like their angst was off in a room, reenergizing. Booting up.

3) All hopped up on happiness and joy and a brand new toy, your children will behave like wretched brawlers who never learned love or to share.

4) EVER.

5) Also, your children will suddenly turn deaf to your good-mother-disciplinary-actions so instead you will resort to HIGH VOLUME PARENTING.

6) You will call your sister in tears, waving your white flag of exhausted surrender.

7) Hoarse and done, you will laugh because she will let you.

D) We'll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

1) You will ring in the next decade with people you love. You will play cards with your nephews.

2) You will not be with the people you have kissed at midnight for 15 midnights in a row and you will feel lonely for them, yet not lonely.

3) Your husband will really kiss you and you will really kiss him.

4) You will whisper to him your fortune for the future. He will keep his arms around you, lingering there longer than he has in a while.

5) He will start a new job in days.

To be continued...

Exactly Why I Am Grumpy in Winter

I am a very courteous driver. I'm all about my blinkers and "no, please, you go!" and "no, really -- you" which I indicate with a brush of my hand, like a broom swooshing traffic. I flash the peace sign, too, to say thanks or you're welcome, which is slightly ironic, if I think about it, because I probably annoy all the people waiting behind me.

Then: it snows.

And the already tiny, cowpath-planned streets in the Small Town become teeny tiny roads for no one but gnomes herding teeny tiny cows. I think the population grows by a third in the summer, maybe more. Who cares? The streets shrink by half in the winter.

I can take some tourists in visors and zinc much better than this race course.

Have you ever tried to negotiate three kids out of a car into a snow bank so high you think you might lose a child to a slushy avalanche that will end under your tail pipe? When all the while you are pinned to the driver's door, frisk-style, because that's the only way you might live to see another day? And when you get the chance to make a break from the skidding traffic so you can rescue your stuck kids (one of whom has already lost a mitten), you will slide over ice in that very dainty way in which all your body parts disconnect from your brain and your mouth makes that rubber-band shape of horror that is so, so pretty?

Ever done that?

I have. Like EVERY DAY.

So tomorrow when I frown in your rear-view mirror when you hover and make your exhaust fill up my car as you wait for that one last spot at school pick-up? Please know that my frown is your frown -- I know you feel my pain.

I know you know my frustration and the ache of my kids' backpacks loaded with spare shoes and snow pants and that one glove for which we'll never find a match. I know you hustle your kids as quick as you can into the car and I also know it's like moving a stiff mummy into a very tiny box. I know how it is.

I know.

So when I unfortunately frown and don't flash the peace sign tomorrow? You'll get me, right? I mean, you'll know.

It's winter. I keep my fingers on the wheel.

Heaven, Dear Woman, Heaven

Polite Fictions Beta 2 began.

It's not a narrative thing to keep up with, but a bunch of men and women writing stuff about one theme: the Afterlife.

Yep.

It's gonna be hella deeeeeep. And juicy.

Check. It. Out.

The Giant Clock, It Tocks for Me

Imagine this hugely huge clock. See it? Got it?

Imagine that giant clock holds all the times of your life. It's the clock that has registered each second you've lived. It has seen every moment and measured it, added it, noted it down, recorded it, Swiss-like.

Kinda cool. Right? Or scary?

If that clock existed, would you leap upon the hour hand and turn it back a bit or a lot? Would you leap on to change things or just to relive them? Would you rewind to live better or to live time again, or both?

I'd do it, if I could -- damn straight, I would leap for the hour hand -- and this is (partly) how:

In 1975 at about 7:37 in the morning Pacific time: I would relive the car track Santa delivered.

In 1978 at about 3:15 EST: I would not head-butt my father in the balls.

In 1982 on Easter Sunday: I would not choose lavender overalls.

In 1982 on Easter Sunday: I would tell my mother sooner.

In 1986: I would have I ditched him once and for all.

In December, 1989: I would hold the hour hand in freeze-frame: I would ski forever, the way I looked then, the way I felt then, the way I was then: not a care, but for me and my skis. No heart-break, just muscles, the last of me as an athlete; the last time I would be fully alone.

In 1990, in June, at 6:37pm EST: I would relive his funny happiness. His joy. His sweetness. (I would never see it again.)

In 1992, sometime in July, at a small bar in Connecticut: I would hold the hour hand in full-stop again. I would keep that pitcher of beer cold forever; I would keep that plastic table cloth between us. I fell in love and I said it out loud.

April - June 1994: I would bring my grandmother with me, even though I hated trying on wedding dresses.

1995 February: I guess it had to happen, but I wish I never accused my father of the stupid things I did. I would stop time and breathe deeply and do it over: no silly words, just a swift kick to the 'nads.

Latter part of 1997 into all of 1998: Fast forward. Please, Sweet Clock: just skip all of it.

August 6, 1999, 11:13am EST: FREEZE. STOP TIME. She was born.

May 25, 2001, 3:25pm EST: Skip to...

May 25, 2001, 3:29pm EST: She breathes. FREEZE. STOP TIME.

2001 - 2004: I would hang on the hour hand, let it pass but slooowwweer.

March 8, 2004: I would welcome my mother in four seconds after he was born, not the twenty minutes before in which she must have thought that both of us might die.

2004-2008: Slooooowwww the clock again. They were so cute and chubby and hilarious and devious and delicious and I wished I could see them more the way that everyone else did. And as I did. When I was second-guessing myself. Or crying.

2008, not sure when: STOP CLOCK. Completely. Thank the Kid profusely for starting a blog for me. Really. Stop the clock. Throw him a party. He's gonna need it...

2008-right this minute: I hang on to the second hand and the minutes passing and I let the hours go. I write it down as best I can and read when I can and I find love and friendship far-flung and nearby and start to think that time is my friend and not an enemy and that maybe this clock is as close as I will ever get to really knowing anything. Anything. Anything that matters.

Tick.
Tock.
You gotta a clock?