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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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1:22 a.m. - 2005-05-03
First, thanks muchly to those shy folk who stepped up and said hello. I appreciate it. I write to stay sane, but I’d be lying if I said the eyes and ears out there didn’t matter. Surprises me how many guys check in here. I’ve always thought I was hostess of a real estrogen fest, but maybe it’s interesting to you guys to see how the other half thinks. Or you could just be boobie lovers like Petrouchka and stop by hoping I’ve posted pics of my tits. Was that insulting? I didn’t mean it to be. I’m sure there’s chicks out there hoping for titty pics too. (Bah-dump-dum-ching) Yes, yes, LA was bleaching the grout again today. Wheee! Cheap thrills in the monkey house. My back is speaking to me most unkindly. I went at it hard and heavy and my lumbar region did not appreciate the insane burst of cleaning. My house was feelthy. Not just weekend cluttery, but nasty grimy yuckiness. The dirt had to go. I shook my groove thing with Mr Clean for 4 solid hours this afternoon. I haven’t showered yet so now the only feelthy thing on the first floor of the Hobbit House is me. Okay, my office is none too spiffy either, but like my milky sugary tea, my office is an indulgent safety valve. I smoke in here. I let the dust and the cobwebs do as they will. When the trash can gets full I just drop my leavings on the floor and only pick up when my chair can’t roll over the debris anymore. The bookcase has a Fibber McGee’s closet thing going, disturbing one item will send an avalanche of other stuff tumbling to the floor. Occasionally I get bonked on the head, but I’m pretty quick for a crip and usually manage to duck in time. Wolf’s already been and gone for the Go To Sleep song. My weird kid is on a health kick and decided he needs to go to bed a bit earlier so he has more energy. Right. Like I need this? The child already boings around like Ricochet Rabbit on meth. However he is also eating like a nutritionist’s wet dream, so I shouldn’t complain. The junkiest thing he eats is the school lunch. Oy, crap on a tray those school lunches. I suppose I could bestir myself to make his lunch, but I reckon if his other meals and snacks are grade-A prime good stuff, he can eat the crap lunch. I have very little guilt about cutting him a check every 6 weeks. He loves going through the lunch line and getting his tray o’slop. Wolf has the lunch ladies thoroughly cowed and they actually set aside pasta without red sauce for him. Ditto an extra serving of the veggies on mashed potato day. My kid is no fan of mashed potatoes. That’s what I mean about Wolf. He just has this aura about him that makes other people go out of their way to make him happy. I pity his future girlfriends. Maybe this is gross, but if my younger son is still a virgin on his 15th birthday I’ll eat a hat. Since there’s only just so much one can say about housecleaning, I’m doing yet another meme. This one is from Minarae. The porcelain skinned goddess Petrouchka somehow hoodwinked into agreeing to marry him. This meme was supposed to be the previous one, but yesterday’s required less thought. These days I’m a brainless dust cloth jockey, so the less cerebral activity the better. If I can’t be original, I can at least meme like a sumbitch. Timelines 25 years ago: Good God! I was 17! Is this possible? I just now double-checked my math on the calculator. Holy crow. I was for all intents and purposes an adult 25 years ago. I don’t feel that old. Seems to me I should be saying something like: “25 years ago I was in nursery school and…” But alas alack, I was mostly grown a score and five ago. The May I was 17 I was preparing for prom. Just one of six black-tie events I went to that season. Funniest thing about prom that year was back in February I’d been asked to go by a guy I only knew by height. A senior to my junior, JF was the tallest guy to attend Hometown High ever. 6’8” of freckled redhead. Since I was the tallest girl and he was the tallest guy we’d struck up an easy sort of friendship, each finding relief that the other would never ask how the weather was up there. When he asked me to prom I thrilled because for once I could wear heels with my gown. Unfortunately I had to break our date some weeks later because I’d gone and gotten myself engaged. I could hardly attend a big deal dinner-dance with someone other than my 5’7” betrothed. JF ended up going to prom with the ugliest cheerleader. He was an unattached varsity jock, it was in the by-laws. JF did me a courtesy dance though. In my ballet flats I was able to tuck my rosebud bedecked coif beneath his chin and lay my cheek against his chest. For the first (and last ) time I understood the safety and bliss of being completely wrapped in someone’s arms. 20 years ago: I was a new mother. The May I was 22 Alex was an amiable drooly thing. Mike was still in school. He’d chosen all morning classes that semester and worked busting tires at Sears in the afternoons. I worked swing shift at a 24 hour establishment. At dinnertime I’d meet Mike in the parking lot at Sears, hand him the baby in his carseat and book down the road to my job. I’d put in my 8 hours and then do all my other work. Grocery shopping. Laundry. Fortunately we lived in a college town and just about everything was open around the clock. Occasionally I’d go home first and scoop Alex up and take him with me on my errands. He liked the laundromat. The place was un-air conditioned and had big fans with ribbons tied to the grilles. Snugged into a clothes cart Baby Alex would watch the flapping ribbons and coo with delight. 15 years ago I had a bookstore. A slowly dying bookstore. Video killed the out-of-print store. That and my parking places along the side of the building had been replaced with a lovely sidewalk and wide greensward. Some doofus on the town council decided what our 18th century crowded little downtown really needed was fewer parking slots and more decorative foliage. Great, just great. Nobody used that sidewalk except Alex on his tricycle and I watched my business dry up and blow away. It was hard enough attracting customers, making them park 4 blocks away just sent them to the mall instead. There’s a bodega in my old bookstore now. About the only business that’ll survive. The neighborhood is entirely given over to recent Mexican immigrants. Very few of them have cars, but they all need to eat. Podunkville is so upper-crusty it doesn’t even have a grocery store. One must drive to a more crass and plebian town if one wants to (shudder) do food shopping. However if you need a $1,700 mountain bike or have a couple thou to blow on an antique chamber pot, Podunkville is your place. 10 years ago: I was a mess. Talk about good news/bad news! My Paris Island physical rehabilitation program had driven back the worst predations by the MS and I was in a long wonderful remission. The bad news was the idea that I was chronically ill and had been told by no less than 3 very learned doctors not to renew my magazine subscriptions. My head was fucked. Big time. The good news was that because I had nothing left to lose, I became brave in all manner of things. This served me well in my work and I became a top producer. Lord how the money rolled in. On top of that I was being head hunted. Hardly a week passed without a job offer and a goodie. A swank lunch. Corporate logo stuff like desk sets and sweat shirts. Letters of intent with juicy offers of signing bonuses and heftier commissions. I was gooooood. The bad news was because I didn’t have much time, I didn’t care fuck-all for what anyone else thought. This included Mike. My marriage was in complete disarray and I didn’t give a shit. I’d played it his way for over a decade and it had netted me zilch. I was going to die without seeing Paris or even a Broadway show. He had best step back and stay the hell out of my way. I had a life to live before I checked out and no amount of boo-boo face on his part was going to stop me. My devotion to Alex even wavered a bit. He suffered along with everyone else who was attached to my life at that point. The ready-steady Mom he’d always known was forever flying out the door on the quest for one adventure or another. It’s to my credit that I never missed a tae-kwon-do lesson or a band concert. Our Thursday night date went on as usual, but that happy sappy mom who breathlessly listened to every single detail of every single school day was gone with the wind. Working. Partying. Shooting pool. Schmoozing clients. The good news was I finally shed the baby weight. Never in my life had I been so Barbie. Let’s chuck the baby with the bath water. I was hot shit. The bad news was I knew it. Fricken shameless. I used my looks like a sledge hammer. Me with my miles deep cleavage and my glow-in-the-dark platinum hair and my 27” inch waist and my killer custom fit wardrobe. I batted my sexy green cat’s eyes and anything I wanted came to my hand. Anything. 10 years ago I was not a Nice Person. 5 years ago I was overwhelmed. My marriage still sucked. Only now my health had gone in the crapper. I’d gotten hugely fat. I didn’t have a job. What I did have was a teenage son who was pleasant enough, but who thought working to his potential meant beating Zelda and managing not to bathe for a week. I had a string of foreign kids, some uber-mom lunacy inspired by an overlarge house and a very persistent exchange student rep. That same overlarge house was becoming a sty and I couldn’t seem to stay on top of it no matter how hard I tried. And I had Wolf. A child whose only mode of communication was screaming tantrums. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t talk. He didn’t listen. He didn’t toilet train. He didn’t do a goddamn thing HE didn’t want to. And mostly what he wanted to do was messy, dangerous, obnoxious, or some combination thereof. I cried a lot. 3 years ago: My mother died. Thus setting me free in more ways than I could have imagined. But first I had to work through a whole poisonous swamp of unresolved shit that would never be resolved face-to-face. Not now. The bitch had up and died. Not a heart attack or a car accident, she’d died of cancer. And it had taken the better part of two years for her to do it. Did she call? No. Did she write? No. Did she cut me out of her will and name my sister as an only child in her obituary? You bet your ass she did. So my little sister the only child walked off with the boodle. Well, mazel tov. Whatever was left of our grandfather’s portfolio that hadn’t gone up our mother’s nose (like Shrub, my mother was a big supporter of Columbian supply-side economics) my little sister could spend on Smirnov and Darvon. But out of that stupendous fortune a tiny fraction came my way in the form of some neglected IRA accounts. Millions it wasn’t, but what I got was enough to put a substantial down payment on the Hobbit House and finance a complete renovation. Plus put my kid through college. So my mother had unwittingly set me free. I was free from The Landlord for the first time in my life. I was free to give my son this last best gift I could give him as a parent. A college degree and a way out of minimum wage jobs and his name on his shirt. And I was free from her. Free from the never-ending vigilance of protecting my children from her brand of evil. Free from having to be the Anti-Mom and being the saint to her sinner. Free to be as arty, as off-beat, as strange as my soul needed to be and never once worry about scorn and belittling acid comments. Last year: I was riding high. The move to the new house had set in motion a bunch of positive and happy changes. Mike and I were still duking it out, but there was forward momentum. Not just the same old, same old battles we’d be having since our college days. I’d wrested myself out of the self-defeating cycle of apathy and comfort gorging. I’d lost a pile of weight. I’d located my writing voice finally. I was keeping a sane and ordered house for the first time in many years. I’d discovered I wasn’t a half-bad gardener and reaped a heck of a lot more than tomatoes from my raggedy, but well intentioned gardens. Alex was happy up on campus. Fulfilled in spirit as he hadn’t been during high school. Busy and excited and full of plans. Wolf had come around too. Really truly talking. I blissed out on being able to finally converse with my recalcitrant younger son. I was his mother at last and not his keeper anymore. This year: I came to terms with my limitations and realized how little the physical has to do with how worthy a person I am. Neither physical beauty nor physical handicaps define me as they once did. Yesterday: I went to the park with my guys. I kept Mike giggling as I ‘read’ the other parents and kids for him. He’s still not very good at seeing people on his own, but once I point things out to him he gets it. We both had a huge horse laugh over this one kid who shouted, “Hey! Come here and help me stab this guy!” Not that we think violence is funny. It was that for once it wasn’t our kid who was being a noogie. Today: I set my house in order. I burned a ton of calories. I took a break from this thing and showered. I smell better now. Tomorrow: I will plant. Weather permitting. If the weather gods don’t come through for me then I shall do twice as much laundry as planned and spend some quality time with Bill Murray. I bought Lost in Translation at Sam’s on Saturday and haven’t gotten a chance to watch it yet. . Th-th-th-that’s all folks. ~LA
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