kdiddy.org

“I’m in desperate need of a chainsaw.”

Velveeta casserole, 1949

I love mac and cheese, and I love tomatoes. Velveeta and I are cool and I’m perfectly happy to share the company of a hard-boiled egg or two. But all together in casserole format is just wrong. And what sick son of a bitch puts Velveeta on hard-boiled eggs? Right on the yolk like that. Post-war prosperity was a sick and twisted place it seems.

There are crappy days, and there are really horrible days. Then there are the days in between, days like today, that you know you’ll survive but they’re pretty awful in the meantime.

First off, many many thanks to the bunches of you that subscribed to the feed on LJ. Secondly, thank you so much for the comments that you’ve been leaving over there, but may I make one tiny request of you? If you are going to comment, please click through and leave them on the entries here at kdiddy.org proper. Leaving them on the entries that come through the feed via LJ is cool, but I don’t get any notification of them and sometimes I miss them. Plus, there aren’t too many people reading over here so I could really use the company!

Gracias!

I drank too much coffee this morning so after doing about an hour’s worth of work in 10 minutes, I decided to go to the gym to work off some energy. I felt perilously close to gnawing on my desk, see. After I was done working out, I made my way to the locker room and when I got to the door I could hear some chanting inside. The hell? I went in and found that the ROTC students were sprawled on the floor in front of my locker row and were doing some leg kick/ab exercise with the whole, “1 2 3 HUH!” thing. What was even better was that their senior ROTC officers were standing over them and screaming in full Lee Ermey style, berating them for constantly giving up and that until they did it perfectly they were going to keep doing the same thing. I stood there for a few seconds, unsure of what to do. I figured tiptoeing through the cadets and saying, “Sorry for disrupting your hell week but I simply MUST get a shower. That treadmill’s a killer!” might not go over so well. So I just went back to the gym and worked out for a few more minutes. Thanks, ROTC, for forcing me to burn 100 more calories…I thought of you when I ate a burger at lunch.

In the long and illustrious history of me having conflicting emotions and restless nights over Dumb Shit, my angst over the transition from Live Journal to my own blog has to be some of the silliest nonsense ever. I cried over quitting horrible jobs where I was misused. I cried when I graduated from middle school, which was responsible for two of the most miserable years of my life. This morning, I teared up a little bit thinking about writing what will basically be my last post over there.

Comparing my LJ to such bad things as abusive employers and teachers isn’t really fair, since I was never miserable there, but I know that I am tired of the whole thing and I can’t shake the sense that it’s time to move on. I’m concerned that most of the people with whom I’ve made connections with on LJ will no longer care what I blather on about over here. Over five and half years, I’ve read along as the people who I know on some weird detached level of intimacy have fallen in and out of love, married, divorced, gotten pregnant, had miscarriages and abortions, had babies, found new jobs or lost old jobs. And in that time a handful of people have followed along as I went from an insecure, young mother to…an insecure, slightly older mother. I also, you know, graduated college, got some jobs, bought a house, got married, tumbled through some horrible depression, started grad school. I know I’m not totally boring. I just don’t know if I’m engaging enough at this point to build a whole new motley crew.

But all of that whining aside, I am really excited to be here in my own space.

testing this out.

I was kind of disappointed that I didn't get a chance to make a proper entry yesterday since I had some funny stories to tell. But the whole neck thing was making computer use a little difficult. Also, between my two-year-old son and 49-year-old mother, someone is constantly at my heels yipping about something. Right now, however, my son is napping (for the first time in about a week and a half) and my mom is distracting herself with something in the kitchen. The boyfriend, who I think I've seen all of five minutes since Sunday evening, is at work. I'm going to try to squeeze in an entry before my mom comes up here and tries to make me do something arbitrary since she hates to see me relaxed.\
Sunday afternoon, we went out to my grandparents' house to visit with some of our cousins. Thomasina and Eric, who are my second cousins, have six kids. All boys. Ages 1-10. Yeah. Great parents, great children but I look at them sometimes and think, “What the FUCK?” They have a set of twins, Jared and Cullen, who are 9. Cullen is very inquisitive and when I say “inquisitive” I mean “nosy”. He really likes to ask questions that, at his age, are pretty cute, but if were anyone over the age of, say, 13, it would be very, very rude. A few summers ago, we were all basking in the lake at Conneaut. I had recently announced to my extended family that I had a bun in the oven. Cullen, at that point already entirely steeped in Catholic education, was confused, since he knew that the boyfriend and I were not married. He looked at me and asked, “How can you have a baby if you're not married?” I blushed and told him to ask his parents. He and his twin brother were also constantly amazed at how someone of my advanced age would still be in school. Granted, I started college late and it took me an extra year due to my royal fuck-up in College Algebra and that whole baby thing and, at times, it did seem as though I had been in college for decades, but still…\
Every time I saw Cullen, he would ask me, “Are you still in school?” Now that I've finally graduated college he has focused all of his energy on my marriage, or lack thereof. I'm guessing that he just really wants to be in a wedding or an excuse to wear a tuxedo and dance to ABBA at a reception while all of the grownups are acting stupid. His only immediate hope for a wedding is me. It's amazing that, of all the traditional people in my family, the most marriage pressure I'm getting is from my 9-year-old cousin. Anyway, within five minutes of walking in the door, Cullen looked at me and said, “Did you and the boyfriend get married yet?” apparently terrified that we would go and get married on the sly and use some other little boy for ringbearer or whatever short boys do in weddings. I told him no, but that he would be the first to know.* The boyfriend told him “by the time you're 18,” (ooh! looks like we have a date! ;-p) and that seemed to quell his fears.\
Later on in the afternoon, as the baby and I were playing, Cullen looked at me with his eyebrows furrowed and asked, “Did you breastfeed the baby?” I was a little stunned, but stammered, “Um, yes.” He nodded and said that that was “good.” I was happy to have his approval…I guess.\
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Yesterday, not too much was accomplished, and the neck pain had me in a pretty foul mood for most of the day. I did manage to drag myself down to CMU to fill out my citizenship form and W-4 (ugh). I did receive a visit from and which was nice. I felt that I wasn't at my witties, however, and was slightly relieved when they left. Not because I don't like them (I lurve them gals), I just didn't feel like I was being very entertaining. ;-p\
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Today I had a few errands to run, namely exchanging some bras that my mother gave me for Christmas. She underestimated my cuppage and overestimated by bandwidth(?). In any case, my tits looks very nice now. The cashier tried to convince me to buy the accompanying “panties” which were of the itsy-bitsy thong variety. I don't think I did a good job of hiding my horror. Nothing against you thong-enthusiasts, but I just don't get it. Grocery shopping was also needed. After the lingerie exchange, I dashed into Bruegger's to grab some lunch for me, my mom and the baby. I got some of that Oregon Chai stuff, which was tasty while it was warm but by the time we got to Giant Eagle it had cooled off considerably and was no longer drinkable in my opinion. However, Giant Eagle doesn't seem to provide garbage cans for its customers, so I walked through that entire store with a cup of cold chai.\
At the beginning of our shopping excursion, I had dropped off my prescription for baby repellant. While my mom headed for the checkout aisle, I sauntered over to the pharmacy with the baby, thinking he needed to stretch his legs after being trapped in the shopping cart's basket for at least an hour. When we got to the pharmacy we were greeted with a line that rivalled the bread lines of yesteryear. I was shocked, but filed into place next to a cosmetics display. As we waited, the baby became restless. An elderly woman in front of us tried to talk to him but he got shy and requested that I pick him up. Still holding the cold chai, I set it down on the cosmetics display for a second so that I could scoop him up. Wouldn't you know that a rather portly elderly man tried to squeeze past to get into the drug line and knocked the chai off of the display. He, being a gentleman, exclaimed, “What in the hell was that?” I was embarrassed and didn't admit to the beverage being mine, but did grab the cup and put it back on the display. There was, however, a few small puddles of chai on the floor, and I did not know what to do about them. I didn't have any tissues or anything on me and if I left to go alert the staff to the spill I'd lose my place in line. So I just turned around and continued waiting. Then, of course, droves of elderly people with very brittle-looking hips and feeble tickers started heading for the drug line and I watched them walk past the spill and managed to avoid it. I was sure one of them was going to fall but they didn't.\
That disaster averted and baby repellant in hand, we left. I wanted to stop in a bookstore but I figured that the baby had had enough. Hopefully, the boyfriend will be able to take me to run some errands this week before I START MY NEW JOB ON MONDAY! EEEKKK!\
I'm starting to get kind of nervous now and I'm already missing the baby a little bit. The other night I had a nightmare that I was at my first day and my boss said, “Of course, you will be responsible for the laundry of the entire English Department.” *shudder*\
I'm going to go see what I can rustle up for dinner.\
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*Funnily enough, I was 9 when his parents were married and was dying to be a flower girl. When Thomasina actually called me with the formal offer, I was speechless.

We may have a tie for best entry ever on Live Journal.\
http://www.livejournal.com/users/screaming_rose/153722.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spoonfeeding/53263.html\
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That entry right there ^, gets my vote for the best entry on all of Live Journal for 2003. I, a writer, am humbled.\
I don't have any specific reasons for why I like it so much, I just dig it in an extreme manner.