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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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3:01 p.m. - 2010-11-13
Sloooooowly crawling out from under. I could look for and name all the reasons or suspected causes, lining up the usual suspects like hormones, change of seasons, end of daylight saving, blah, blah, feh. Whatever. That's a big one with me lately, eh? 'Whatever.' Frankly I'm sick of exploring my navel and forcing myself to trek through my mess and put it into neat categories and define clinical causalities. I'm tired of trying to fix myself and bored out of my skull with rooting out all the whys and wherefores of my mess's origins. (I can only imagine how bored you are, my stalwart friends.) I'm tired, too, of either making myself stuff my feet into those metaphysical tap shoes and doing a maniacally cheerful Shirley Temple buck and wing and/or donning the itchy sackcloth and guiltily apologizing for feeling like shit when there's no big glaring Day-Glo reason for it. Occasionally I get a decent nightmare-free night's sleep, like last night, and I get out of bed with my brain firing on all cylinders. Trotting downstairs to make breakfast for my guys and able to plot out the day's course. Most days I don't. Can't. Whatever. Did myself a proper and finally bought a laptop. It's really to share with Wolf. When he goes back to district and starts high school in the fall he'll be needing access to a machine and I share my desktop with no one. Not even people I married or gave birth to. I've been wanting more freedom to move around anyhow. Dopey to be paying for Wi-Fi and sitting nailed to this chair all the time. Of course Mick and the ex out in his chicken coop share the network too, as will Wolf when he's using the laptop, but there's times when I wish I could be writing outside or hike over to the coffee shop and still be plugged into the world. I considered a netbook, an iPad, and even just a really snazzy phone, but one of my priorities is being able to watch movies and for me I want a decent sized screen. I do NOT want to watch a movie on my goddamn phone. When I bought my current desktop I picked one that had a screen the size of a drive-in. Ditto the new laptop, it's a big one, the largest they had. My other priority is to start traveling more now that Wolf is edging into self-care and now that he and Mick can survive together without me to referee all the time and can muddle along on their own together for a few days. The idea of a longish train trip and squinting at a dinky 2"x3" screen to check my messages and update from the road and yeah, watch my beloved movies sucks rocks. I'm happy to lug my humongus herky new laptop. Despite its size it's pretty light and I upgraded it to have the max battery life possible. Ms LA the Happy Wanderer won't have to go parched and thirsting because the magic box where all her friends live and her personal movie house lives is back at home on her messy desk. Though, perversely, one of the things I like most about traveling is the idea I am out of reach. Is there an element of, "Nar, nar, nar! Figure it out for yourselves!"??? Of course. Ol' Mom the Workhorse and Answerer of All and Any Questions No Matter HOW Inane is off the reservation and you chuckleheads are on your own. More though it's the freedom it gives me. I feel allowed to be off-duty. The moral obligation to take care of everyone else is shaken off and I remember who I am as a single player. A lone unit. A person who exists beyond my service and function to others. A bazillion years ago when Alex was in kindergarten and I had my bookstore I went on a tax write-off buying trip to Colorado. I did take care of a lot of business and made several valuable antiquarian bookseller contacts (back in those dim days before Amazon and the internet), but mostly it was a trip to visit with my friend, Sue, and slope around Boulder and the near environs on the trail of Stephen King and the real-life places that showed up in his books. (*The actual Stanley Hotel, basis for the setting of 'The Shining' as a book is nothing like the hotel Kubrick used for his movie.) Anyhoodle, during my visit my friend was reduced to astonished laughter several times. At each street crossing and across every parking lot I automatically stuck out my hand. Stuck it out to halt any impetuous running into traffic and to hold onto the hand of a child who was in reality 2,000 miles thataway. Childless Sue, giggling and somewhat awed, could NOT believe that I'd become SUCH a mom that even when separated from my child by two time zones I was still on duty. Still keeping him safe. Still making sure I was there to protect and walk him past the danger. I did. I would. I always do.
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