Four-year-olds get it.

If you ask Meredith how our dog, Lincoln, died, she will tell you that he ate a bee.
(He died from a tumor in his spleen.)

If you ask her how her grampa died, she will tell you that aliens came down in a space ship and scared him to death.
(He had a heart attack.)

I would like to be able to believe how she believes.

Big News

I finally got a new job. It's with the school district, so the benefits are great and the pay is bad, and I'm super excited because I get to be all organizey and creative and I will probably even get to write some.

Pie

So. That pie in the face from the universe? Yeah.

When I got to work that day and checked in on all my stalking social media sites, there was a Facebook post from an old high school friend about a job at his company. I jumped on it. At first it seemed like it was going to be the solution to all my problems, but now it seems to have fizzled out. F-word.

But something life-changing did happen to me that day. Have you heard about Levi's and how they have this new "Curve ID" system with their jeans for people like me, who have smallish waists and biggish bums whose jeans always gap at the waist, or just plain slide off?  I was curious, if a bit skeptical, so I went to the Levi's store at the Mall of America that night to try some on. And you guys, these jeans are my butt's holy grail. The "bold curve" fits my waist and my hips. And they come in different inseams too. So they fit my waist and my hips and my short legs! I swear to Garp, this has never happened before.

So yeah. My life changed on that day.  I now own two pairs of jeans that fit me. Not quite the change I was hoping for, but better than a sharp stick in the eye.

All those other things? I still don't know.

The Message

I haven't been around here much lately. Well, I've been here, but my mind has been elsewhere. (I love that word: elsewhere. It's right up there with nevertheless. ) Worrying about Stella and Kelly, getting the kids ready for school, job hunting and feeling sorry for myself seem to be occupying all my brain space these days. I've been in a funk. Anxious about finding a job before my health benefits run out, wondering where to put the money I'm going to get soon, sure I'm going to make the wrong decision. My brain's tied up in knots.

So this morning, I dropped the kids off at their dad's for the weekend and as I was driving away this song was playing on the radio.


This is one of those songs that, when you hear it by chance, you're supposed to stop and look around you and see what kind of message the universe is sending you. And pay attention. And then act.

So I'm sitting at the light on a ridge looking out over the valley - at Valleyfair, it always seems like Brigadoon on foggy mornings like this, an amusement park, shrouded in mist, appears before you from another world - and the kind of car that I've been thinking about buying with some of the money turns in toward me from the left. Is this what the universe is trying to tell me? I should go ahead and buy this car? It's got all wheel drive and would be safer in the winter, and the automatic transmission would make my torturous daily commute a little less painful. (What kind of an idiot buys a stick shift car when they spend two hours a day in stop and go traffic on a four lane highway? This kind, right here.)

Or maybe I'm being given a sign that one of the jobs I applied for this week is going to work out. Maybe I'll get the call today. So I'm sticking with that thought as the light turns green and I pull out onto Flying Cloud Drive, which would be such a nice name for a road if I didn't have to drive on it so early every morning, when a garbage truck roars past and cuts me off. I pull into the other lane, still meditating on what message I'm being sent.

Suddenly, a piece of garbage flies off the top of the truck and whirls toward me. I flinch, it's round and metallic - am I about to be beheaded by a hurling hub cap? No time to react, I hold my breath, watching as it whips in the wind and shoots straight for my windshield - SPLAT. It is a pie tin. Pie residue spatters across my car and I realize as I exhale and turn on the wipers that the universe just got my attention and then threw a pie in my face.

For Stella

I'm not really religious. At all. But my friends just had a baby, born with a heart defect and in critical condition. And there's nothing I can do, but I feel like I need to do something, so I pray. I don't know if I'm praying to God, or rather, begging the universe to just this once not let the worst happen.

Please let Stella be OK.

Books

Mom retired from teaching this year and is putting her house on the market so there's been a major purge of books from her house: kid books and grown up books. Lucky us. Everything from Plato to Alice Hoffman. It's like a bookstore barfed on my stairs.

I've got a hot date with some bookshelves this weekend.

Where I'm From

I am from homemade bread, from Campbell's Soup Kids cups and goats' milk.
I am from an overgrown log cabin with cattle skulls nailed above the door - drafty and crooked, and clay grit in the carpet.
I am from sticky jack pine sap and peeling birch tees, the island in the river, and mini bikes tearing through the hills. From the fire tower and the woodpile and the attic of the barn.
I am from reading together on the floor, dinner in front of the TV and dogs in my bed.
I am from Tolkien and Millay and The Beatles.
I am from sarcasm and silliness and tickling until you cry.
From sticks and stones will break your bones but words will never harm you. (But they will.)
I am from bitter, lapsed catholicism and the hole that it left.
I'm from names with too many consonants that cannot be pronounced, sauerkraut and sausage for Thanksgiving and oyster stew on Christmas Eve.
From the Tet Offensive and a Bronze Star, from freezing toes in too small shoes and learning to knit in Mexico, from the cold, snow-bound winter with no water when we all had the flu.
I am from a folded flag, battered records and books that have been moved a hundred times, ancient and fragile glassware, and a creaky family album that still smells like home.
I am from all the stories that I have yet to hear.


(from here, via Elly)

The Plot

You know that storyline in TV, or is it movies? Both I guess, but mostly movies. Anyway there's this hapless schmuck who just wants to do right by his family, but he's just beaten down by the man, humiliated, and he can't catch a break no matter how much he tries and then finally he snaps and turns to a life of crime?

That.

(except the he's a she me.)

On Vampire Sex

Just like the youth of today, when I was a teen, I was obsessed with vampires. Because before Twilight, there was Anne Rice, and then Buffy and Angel and I ate that shit up like crazy. Immortality. Yes, please. And pale, perfect skin too, of course. What goth girl doesn't wish for that? The idea that a vampire dude could live for hundreds of years and eat thousands of girls and then pick you to want to boink instead of kill? That, my friends, makes you special. And I wanted to be special.

And so when I started watching True Blood, I was kind of expecting it to be the same. Romantic and darkly beautiful. It's not. Don't get me wrong. I love the show. It's campy and gory and it sucks you in. (Get it? Sucks?) But it all changed for me last night as we were watching an episode from last season where Sookie and Bill are having shower sex, and he bites her and the camera pans down her body as the blood mixes with the water running down her skin. And instead of thinking of hot vampire whoopy all I can think is, "That looks like menstrual blood running down her thigh on a heavy flow day."

And poof. I no longer think vampires are sexy.

To my fellow bloggers:

When I'm feeling quiet (a gentler word than blocked) and I have nothing to blog about, I don't like to look at my site. It just sort of sits there looking back at me and says, "Yeah? Whaddaya got to say now, smartypants?" And then I mutter an incomprehensible excuse and go check twitter. And when I don't write, I don't read. Cause you all live on my blogger dashboard, see?  So please don't think I'm breaking up with your blogs, OK? We're just on a break.