1) toasted cinnamon raisin bagels with cream cheese
2) lattes, even if they burn the tip of my tongue
3) the way a library smells and the way they all kind of smell the same no matter where or when you are
4) old Kik-Steps
5) spring break
I turned on Toddlers & Tiaras a little bit ago because nothing else that I wanted to watch was on and I thought it would be a good release to watch something really stupid/infuriating.
This shit is boring. I mean, yeah, fucking freakshow parents and hideous clothes, but it’s…too easy? I don’t know. This particular subculture is so self-contained and weirdly populated with seemingly “normal” people. The problematic aspects of it are just so blatant it’s not even worth thinking about.
Plus, the top prizes in these pageants have titles like “Grand Supreme” and it’s all just getting way too close to some KKK shit for me.
Anyway, I’m watching crap to decompress. I had a HUGE paper due today and had to give a presentation on it. I later described the presentation as a cautionary tale. I got all freaked out beforehand and saved like 5 different copies of my presentation all over the place and I guess uploaded the wrong one in my frenzy. So, halfway through my presentation, I was out of slides. So I said, “Uh…my slides are missing. This is just like a nightmare I once had.”
Luckily, I had printed out hard copies of the notes pages so I just kept going without slides, lubricated by the five gallons of sweat that came pouring out of me. But my professor said that I did really well so COOL.
My back is killing me and has been really achy for the past couple of days. I think I’ve been holding the stress of the paper there or something. I’ve also been spending hours hunched over my computer writing the damn thing.
How are you?
My paper is done. The accompanying presentation is done. I just have to look at both with fresh eyes in the morning for any glaring errors, upload them to Blackboard, give the actual presentation and that will be one more struggle under my belt. The other large-ish assignment was moved back a few days so that gives me some time to breathe and then next week is spring break. Of course, that means that I only have to work full-time and be a mom but seriously that seems like a vacation sometimes.
Anyway, with that major assignment pretty much done I will actually be able to hang out here some more! At least until finals start crushing my will to live but for now it’ll be just like old times! Remember when I used to post here more than once a week? Those were the days, eh?
But for now, I think we’ll keep things light and look at some of the notes I’ve scribbled to myself in the margins of my notebook:
“* talk to Heather”
Uh, okay, self. About what?
“* bring HW2 assignment, task analysis”
I totally forgot to do this.
“Pizza Hut”
Uhhhh. Then in the same margin as “Pizza Hut,” it appears as though I do a little word association:
“zone out
streets
fighter
baby
oscar
trailer park
gorgeous
bride
radio
head”
I think that might actually be the mathematical formula for Radiohead’s video for “Street Spirit,” but who knows.
There’s also this doodle that consumes the word association:
It’s like a…maybe a…It’s like my inner child was eaten by a coral reef or something.
The baby had an allergic reaction last night. For those of you who are new to this corner of the internet, my son has a tree nut allergy. Luckily, we haven’t had much trouble with it and tree nuts are not as pervasive as peanuts, so he doesn’t have to live in a bubble or whatever. Last night was actually only the second time that his allergy flared up, the first time being when we found out that he had a food allergy.
When we go to restaurants, we always ask the staff to check to make sure that no nuts are used in whatever dish the baby is getting and so far this has kept us in the clear. But probably what happened was there was something nearby that got in his food. We had his EpiPen with us and for a few minutes had this vague panic of, “Do we jab him?” But we didn’t since he wasn’t having any trouble breathing. Our poor waitress stopped over to see how our meals were (they were delicious, rogue nuts be damned) and had the misfortune of coming upon the scene of us sitting in silence, watching the baby’s lips swell and uncertainly holding a large, green shot near his thigh. We drove to the hospital and just kind of waited. Eventually the swelling started going down and the baby reported that he felt fine. We took him home, gave him some Benadryl, and put him to bed and checked on him every couple minutes.
I am, of course, tremendously relieved that he is okay and am hoping that these symptoms are as bad as it gets. Avoiding anaphylactic shock would be tops.
It was just one of those moments where it was like, “Of COURSE you’re having a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction. WHY THE HELL NOT? I haven’t had a panic attack in at least 15 minutes, so I was due.” I’ve been working on a mid-term paper for one of my classes for several days now and to say that it’s stressing me out would be an understatement. On Tuesday, around 11 a.m., this particular academic nightmare will be over. I have another, large-ish assignment due on Thursday that I haven’t even looked at because I just can’t deal at the moment.
I never got this stressed about school until I started grad school (and I have the QPAs to show for it!). But I guess the stakes are just much higher this time around. Plus, I have to juggle so much more. It’s really wearing me down. After this semester, I have one class I’ll take in the summer and then one in the fall. Obviously, not having to deal with two classes at once will be a huge relief. I’m just trying to hang on until the end of the year when I will finally be done. It just sucks because I’m wishing for the time to go faster so I can get to a relatively easier phase in life, but in doing so I’m wishing away large chunks of my kid’s childhood. I actually apologized to him the other night for being so grumpy and impatient and busy. I’m doing all this so that I can make a better life for me and my family, but I guess in the thick of it the cost seems way too high.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to get all morose and I didn’t mean for this to sound like, “My kid had an allergic reaction and it was really scary for ME ME ME IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!” I’m glad my kid’s okay, obviously. And I know that this will all be over soonish and it will all be worth it. I will have a pretty kick-ass MA at the end of all this, after all. It’s just that this particular gauntlet of job + writing + school + school + school + being broke + whatever other crap has gotten really old.
Our friend Jwan was over one night a few weeks ago and was treated to the spectacle of a discussion that the husband and I were having. These discussions happen often and aren’t arguments or fights, per se, but heated debates on some issue that I’m right about and usually culminates in me informing the husband that he is, in fact, a vulgar term for female genitalia.
The other night’s discussion was about laundry. I do all the laundry in our house and I’m cool with this. Aside from the fact that I haven’t had time to actually do all of the laundry since around 2006, I do find it a relaxing activity due to its mind-numbing repetition. I’m also, if I do say so myself, damn good at it and have a very meticulous folding method. I also have a very particular routine: whites, lights, brights, blacks and greys, darks, jeans, towels and washcloths, sheets. I go in this order every single time. The past few months I haven’t always been able to get to the blacks and greys load and since nearly all of the husband’s socks are black, he found himself socksless one day.
So he and I went back and forth about how many pairs of socks he had and how many he needed and, duh, he doesn’t have any clean socks because I haven’t gotten to the blacks and greys load yet, and how I needed to do a load right now, and how I didn’t know who the hell he thought he was talking to me that way, and why couldn’t I just do a load of blacks and greys first because he needs fucking socks, and how that’s not the way I DO it motherfucker and how he must want all of his socks to burn in a bonfire since he’s talking to his feminazi wife with tinges of Lucy you got some ‘splainin’ to do and how…DUDE…and then I told him that he is, in fact, a vulgar term for female genitalia.
Jwan was practically in tears laughing over both the conversation and my laundry routine.
But all of this brings me to this point: I have a certain routine when it comes to the internet, too, and posting to this blog is somewhere around step 5. And the way things have been the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to get to step 5 because I HAVE to do steps 1 through 4 first. School has hit me harder this semester than I was anticipating and I spend my weekends either doing homework or fretting about homework and always being grumpy about how my weekends aren’t really mine.
It’s stupid and I hate writing posts that only tell you about how I don’t have time to post. But there it is. And blah. I’m tired.
The baby’s Valentine box that he decorated at school:
It’s J Dilla-themed. (Pardon the homework that I was actively avoiding underneath there.) What’s especially cute is how hard he tried to recreate the Donuts album cover.
Please note the tilt of the head and the smile and the fact that his hat obscures his eyes.
…
The other night, we went to Chipotle for dinner. Since I was away last weekend and the Super Bowl was the weekend before, we haven’t gone grocery shopping in a number of weeks so we were really scrounging for food. The woman who waited on us labeled the baby’s burrito as “The baby’s,” which was pretty wild.
For those of you who might be new here, the baby is not actually a baby. He’s 7 years old. I started blogging when he was, in fact, a baby and the name sort of stuck. So how did this random woman at Chipotle know to call him that?
…
We watched I <3 Huckabee's the other night just because and I was reminded of how much I LOVE that movie. "What happens in a meadow at dusk?" ... I talked to my dad on the phone yesterday and he actually sounded pretty good. Chemo is a motherfucker. ... Five years ago yesterday, I asked the husband (known back then as "the boyfriend") to marry me. It was a (mostly) good idea.
The Google Maps street view of Bangkok Balcony in Squirrel Hill looks like this:
Bangkok Balcony is not, in fact, a milk truck. If you enter a milk truck and expect to get Thai food, you may be disappointed.
I live to inform.
Man, I failed at this venture pretty quickly, didn’t I? Well, I’m not ashamed to own up to that fact and get back into it.
I am a little grumpy this evening because I’m out of Diet Dr. Pepper and I need to just own up to the full-blown addiction I have to that stuff. Also, the baby’s school has been seemingly relentless with needing stuff (valentines! valentines box! project for the 100th day of school! baby picture! treats!). And I just can’t deal right now. Everything is converging with work and school and it’s so frustrating to come home wanting to slow down and having to just keep going, with my schoolwork and taking care of my kid and whatnot.
By the way, I think, for the 100th day of school projects, the school had something in mind involving those classic art supplies cereal and/or pasta and Elmer’s glue and posterboard. That’s not how we roll in my house, though. When I remembered tonight that he needed his project tomorrow, I let out a hearty, “Oh fuuuuuuuuuuck,” then went rummaging in the kitchen. We’re not big cereal eaters and I didn’t think 100 stale flax flakes would really cut it. So I plopped the baby down with some sketch paper and bingo markers and he made 100 dots. It’s like the perfect illustration of the looooonnng ellipsis of my brain. Or something.
Onward.
1. The totally sweet card that my kid made for his dad at school today, because he knew his dad would like it. Sniff.
2. Making my co-worker laugh really hard.
3. The MamaPop pool of pictures from Vegas.
4. The trip that made those pictures possible.
5. For once, NOT going on and on about how great the Steelers are and just holding that to myself for now. 😉
I fear that I am perhaps the last-ish person from the MamaPop crew to post about our Vegas Vacation (a movie which the husband tells me we watched several nights ago but I have no recollection of this whatsoever which caused the husband to rest his weary head in his hands but whatever because like I was telling him last night while I was “reading” for class, I can read paragraphs of stuff and realize that I’ve absorbed none of it and it’s like my mind has two tracks: one that is sieve-like and does what it should be doing in the most begrudging manner and the other that thinks about more important things like cupcakes and bunnies…just like you’re doing right now). So you might be over the whole thing by now, but that’s too bad.
As I’ve mentioned before, this was my biggest trip ever (I don’t get out much) and the fact that I was going alone had me extra paranoid. My flight out of Pittsburgh was supposed to depart at 8:20 a.m., so I estimated that I should be at the airport at 6:20 a.m. and, using kdiddy math where 2(x+y) = casserole, I determined that I should order a cab for 5:30 a.m. “Worst-case scenario, the cab is an hour late and I’m still there in plenty of time because there won’t be traffic. Best-case scenario, the cab comes on time and I can just press my nose on the glass of the airport until they let me in,” I reasoned.
It was kind of a long day. Pittsburgh to Chicago, 2 hour layover, then Chicago to Vegas, then shuttle from the airport, surrounded by members of the Sigma Alpha Douche fraternity who had big plans to PARTY AND FUCKIN’ PARTY AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW HARD I’M GONNA PARTY, DUDE, to the hotel where I met up with Tracey and blinked and said, “I don’t understand when this is.” Because the time zones were totally fucking with me. It was like that scene in Spaceballs where they’re like, “This is now now. Everything that’s happening now, is happening now.”
When most of the rest of our crew got there, we went to the Bellagio for The Buffet where I was still too tired to eat and I nearly wept when I saw the desserts that I passed up AND sipped on quite possibly the worst wine ever.
But the weekend wasn’t about the food or the wine or the cost of everything (because, really, I’d rather not get into it), but about hanging out with the people who, up until this weekend, were all 1s and 0s. We sat at the Bellagio and gaped at the cover band’s track selection (“Ants Marching,” then “Smooth,” then “Fire and Rain?!?!?” Seriously?!?!). We trekked a billion miles to a karaoke night that was discontinued just a few weeks before we arrived. We Twittered and Twittered and Twittered.
The driver of the cab that Jason, Tracey, Sarah, and I took back from Failaoke added insult to injury by subjecting us to Nickelback. I will never forgive him.
Black Hockey Jesus and his wife welcomed us into their home for brunch on Saturday, which was quite possibly my favorite part of the trip. I mostly sat and listened to everyone and thought about how it was cool to hear them all laugh.
Sarah and I went shopping after brunch to get pretty dresses for dinner that night. I blushed a little at how much I spent on my two dresses (one for dinner and one I just couldn’t live without), but when I got dressed that night and rushed through the lobby to meet Sarah, who looked lovely in her dress, I felt a few glances in my direction and I let myself feel snazzy.
The Venetian is indeed a gorgeous place. Bouchon was impressive, though not mind-blowing. I did get to eat the best creme brulee I’ve ever had and laughed until I thought my ribs might break, mostly at the expense of our misguided waiter who I think was in Vegas trying to break out as a stand up comedian. Good luck with that, dude. My trout still had its head, which didn’t phase me, but apparently freaked everyone else out. I am a bad ass, no?
Tracey went back to the room feeling ill while the rest of us wandered around the Venetian’s casino and wondered how anyone could get addicted to gambling, since it is SO BORING. We had an impromptu karaoke session outside one club where the band was playing “You Shook Me All Night Long.”
Schmutzie and Palinode retired for the evening so we bid them farewell and lamented the fact that our time together was so short. Sarah, Amber, Danielle, and I went to the Bellagio to watch the fountain show, set to that obnoxious, “I’m Proud to Be An American/God Bless the U.S.A.” song.
Back at the Flamingo we watched the waitresses shuffle about in their blazer/dress things, their eyes heavy with Vegas life and presumably landing there after they turned 30. Finally, we bid each other goodnight and farewell.
Tracey and I got room service in the morning and lounged in bed eating eggs and drinking coffee, talking about life and shit. Vegas is a tad bleaker during the day, without the darkness and flashing lights to cover up a multitude of crap. But it is constantly appealing to your senses, with mixed results. The flap-flap of the people handing out trading cards of prostitutes all along the strip, the constant ding-ding-ding of the machines, the occasional cheer of that elusive pay-out, the can’t-put-your-finger-on-it scents pumped in to the hotels, the smoke, the booze, the snippets of conversation, the palpable sense that you’re getting away with something just by being there.
I joked later that we were all ramping up for a crazed weekend, especially in contrast to the many bloggers at the wholesome Blissdom conference. But we were all in bed by 12:30, no one got especially drunk, and I even got some homework done.
You might say that we did Vegas all wrong and you might be right. But I sat at the bar in the Flamingo on Sunday, sipping on my gin and tonic lunch and chatting with bartender Lil Joe about the Steelers, killing time, the last one to leave, and felt my chest tighten. I just had such a good time. I missed my husband and my son. I couldn’t wait to get home to them.
But I really missed my friends, too.
I know it’s been…*checks watch*…one week since we’ve talked. But I am alive and well. I’m sorry to have left you hanging. It won’t happen again. Take Ike back, Tina. Ike sorry.
Seriously, everything’s been totally crazy since last Friday. In a good way, mostly. There was that whole Super Bowl thing and then I had about 5,000 things due for school and 50 million things to do for work, especially since I’m going to be in Las Vegas this weekend.
Oh, did I not mention that? Well, yes, I’m in Las Vegas until Sunday and will be hanging with a bunch of the other MamaPop writers. I’m excited. I get to hang out with my buddy Tracey and my girl Amber and meet a bunch of other folks and assorted goofballs. AND it’s my first time in Vegas. If you’re not already doing so, you may want to follow me on Twitter if you don’t want to miss a minute of me saying, “OMG SHINY!” or “I’M DOT NRUNK!” or “I WON $5 ON THE SLOTS!” I’m sure it will be riveting.
And, sorry to be corny, but as excited as I am about this little trip, I miss my dudes. It was tough leaving them so early in the morning when the house was all dark and warm.
