kdiddy.org

Ladies and gentlemen, we have…finished a room in our house.

There are, of course, a few details remaining. We need a window treatment and that dresser is actually the baby’s changing table/chest of drawers from when he was but a wee thing and, well, he’s kind of outgrown it. But, yes, this is the first room that I really consider done. Our laundry room is mostly done, but it has an addition off of it that will need to go and I anticipate that causing a few new swear words to be invented.

You say you’d like another angle? Well, alright then.

Perhaps the coolest part is that we were finally able to import the ceiling fan that he had in his room at my mom’s house.

I know that that isn’t the greatest picture, but my cat was intent on photobombing. See:

I could have gone out and heard some good music, but I was feeling super reclusive. I mean, more so than usual. So, I’m twirling my desperately-needs-to-be-washed hair and earlier I cleaned the bathrooms. Otherwise, it’s pretty much like…

By the way, that keyboard is VERY LOUD AND IT’S REALLY HARD TO HEAR THE MATRIX OVER IT GODDAMMIT.

One of the things that I sort of committed to doing and have been pretty successful at so far is getting more sleep. I’ve always considered myself a night owl and up until recently, I’d been doing a fair job of functioning on little sleep. This was often out of necessity, what with school and all, and out of sheer defiance, my reasoning being that I had so little time to just do what I wanted, that I was damn well going to stay up until 2 a.m. on weeknights watching TV.

But a combination of my schedule easing up a bit and, I think, just getting older made me start falling asleep earlier and getting into a better rhythm. I’ve going to bed by 11:30 most nights for a few months and it’s pretty fantastic. I can’t say that my mood is greatly improved because there are a lot of other factors at play there, but I’m at least not as tired and can get up earlier.

I’m also noticing that my dreams have been getting weirder.

Last night was a particularly unrestful night of sleep. I was woken up by the husband climbing into bed after his DJ gig and reeking of stale cigarette smoke, by the cat who was looking for the perfect position around my head and kneading the pillow and pulling my hair in the process and purring incessantly, two or three sneezing fits that were probably a result of the cat sleeping on or around my face, and a nightmare.

The nightmare woke me up and when I finally settled down enough to go back to sleep, the narrative of the nightmare picked up roughly where it left off and I think there are few things more upsetting in life than not being able to shake a bad dream.

This particular nightmare was obviously influenced by me joining the viewership of the new series V and by dousing myself in super-depressing stuff like The Road. But it was a classic anxiety-horror dream in which the world was being colonized by aliens and as eye-roll-worthy as that plot would normally sound, my kid was involved and it took a turn for the terrifying.

All of the children were taken from their parents and surreptitiously replaced with doubles. And what made it weirder was that the doubles didn’t know that they were doubles. The child who had inhuman insides clung to me as he got sick and called me “Mum” and when he spotted my actual son in whatever holding area he was in, he whispered, “There’s a little boy who looks just like me!”

It was terrible, holding and nuzzling this creature who was a perfect facsimile of the person that I love most in the world, realizing that he was not, in fact, my child and that this creature would eventually come to destroy me and everyone else in the world, including my actual kid.

When I fell asleep again and the nightmare returned, it was later in the ordeal and the husband, who was very ill at this point, and I were desperately hiding. But some horrifically loud machine started pulling at the building that we cowered in. We didn’t scream, though, because neither our child nor his sinister double were with us, indicating that we had already lost everything.

When I woke up, I realized that I had accidentally shut off my alarm and slept in a little, which meant that it was a little too sunny and quiet. I couldn’t shake the dream for a long time, and when I stood with the baby at the bus stop, I had to keep blinking to understand that the world was still more or less the same as it was yesterday.

I don’t subscribe to any theories about dreams having real meaning. But they do come from the subconscious. And, if we are indeed made up of the same material as the stars and the planets, making us as much a part of the infinite as the Sun and the Moon and the bizarre and wondrous nebulae, perhaps dreams are just our brains running through all that is possible, having a break from our daily rational existence in what is probable.

My mom likes to tell the story of the time her mom left her in the care of her Uncle Franny one day. When my grandmother came home, she couldn’t find my mom or Uncle Franny. Panicked, she searched all over their neighborhood, and finally came upon them in what used to be Sufak’s Round Corner Hotel. My very young mom was sitting on the bar while Uncle Franny enjoyed some beers.

Tonight, fifty-some years later, the husband was DJing at a club in that same neighborhood. The baby is fascinated with the husband’s DJing career and already has his own record player and a vinyl collection of his own. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to go to gigs with the husband and embark on his own DJing career.

Whenever the husband has a gig, the baby asks if he can come. The answer, of course, is always no because said gigs are always at bars and nightclubs.

Tonight, since my sister-in-law and her boyfriend are in town, we all went out to dinner before he had to be at the club. He suggested swinging past on our way home and letting the baby in for a few minutes just to see what it was like. The baby was thrilled.

After we had finished eating and paid our bill, we made the short drive down to Butler Street. The baby got apprehensive right outside, so I had to kind of push him in. Inside, he spotted his dad at the turntables and walked up to him, much to the bewilderment of the bar’s patrons.

We were only there for maybe five minutes. But the baby could hardly contain how thrilled he was to be there and to see what his dad does when he leaves the house with huge crates of records.

When we left and got in the car, the baby announced, “I’m going to tell all of my friends at school that I went to a night club last night!”

Mom of the Year.

I still have 3.5 hours left on this day to make my daily NaBloPoMo deadline!

I haven’t written until now and don’t have much to report because I was crazily busy at work today.

However, two items of note for this particular date:

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down.

I remember at the time not totally understanding what that meant, but I remember my mom calling me into the living room, telling me that I needed to come watch what was happening. I’ve never forgotten the collective expression of joy on the faces of the people. It’s really weird to think that my kid will never know of such a thing as West Germany and East Germany.

Also, 9 years ago, a handsome young man appeared at my door with a VHS copy of Pi rented from the Blockbuster across the street. Our plan was to watch the movie and hang out. We watched the movie. And hung out. And eventually made out. A lot.

The husband whined that I needed to pick either our relationship anniversary or our wedding anniversary because it’s hard for his man-brain to remember both. I picked the wedding anniversary, but didn’t realize that I was agreeing to not ever mention this anniversary. So I violate some terms. Any time I’ve mentioned it today, he’s barked, “Stop being celebratory!”

No.

A serious downside of NaBloPoMo is having to write on Sundays like these, during which nothing happens. I’m nursing a sore neck after having a spasm yesterday morning while sneezing (just go ahead and let the stupidity of such an event wash over you), watching The Godfather II with way too many commercial breaks, and drinking a Mexican Coke. Aren’t you glad I shared?

You know what you should definitely not do if you’re fighting some sadness? You should definitely not read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The husband saw me starting to read it the other night and said, “Uh, didn’t you say that you were feeling depressed? Then you really shouldn’t read that book.”

“Yeah, I know. I kind of feel like wallowing in it, though.”

“I’m just saying, I started reading that right around the same time that I started reading a book about the troubles in Belfast and I chose to stop reading The Road because it was so much more depressing than the Belfast book.”

I didn’t listen, though. It was a fairly quick read, but the past couple of nights, I would put the book down and try to go to sleep and think, “Well, yes, this may have been a terrible idea.”

I finished it last night and freaked the baby out a little by bursting into tears after closing it. Interestingly, I feel a little bit better today. Even if I could kind of relate to some of the panic that the father feels about taking care of a child in a broken world, I’m obviously not facing the horrific bleakness that they were.

I’m actually in between coats of polyurethaning the stain in the baby’s bedroom-to-be (which we’ve been working on, on and off, for four years). So, you know, I’m just sitting here, waiting for the pink elephants and the birdies and stars to dissipate. Fumes are fun!

Sometimes, when I’m sad like I’ve been, my sadness becomes more of me than I am. Like in Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg’s character lets spirits use her body. Sadness, with its bad posture and shitty clothes, jumps in and sometimes it’s like it gets really drunk and decides to go for a drive. (Note: I am not actually drinking away my sadness.) While it’s driving, it veers off to some unpaved road called Rage. Sadness gets tired of sleeping and sitting around and trying to think positively and goes completely batshit with rage.

I get so angry and every stupid or uncaring thing that people do, to me or to anyone, just makes me angrier. Hearing about people going insane and taking it upon themselves to go on shooting sprees doesn’t make me sad, it just makes me angry.

“We’re all miserable in some way, you prick. Let us decide how we might want to wreak destruction on ourselves,” I think.

I’m sorry to be such a downer on an otherwise beautiful Friday afternoon. But that’s what’s going on in my head.

Does your sadness ever veer off into rage?

My great-uncle brought it back from Italy after World War II and gave it to my grandmother. I wore it on our wedding day.

When I was at the grocery store on Sunday, I was paused at the tea section, hunting for a certain kind of iced tea bags that the husband uses. I couldn’t find the iced tea, but my eye stopped on the boxes of Constant Comment.

In my informal observations, the varieties of teas available to the general public have greatly increased over the past 10 or 15 years, with popularized versions of things like green and chai teas becoming commonplace.

I go through periods of being really into tea and will buy many different flavors, though I remain a devoted coffee drinker as part of my morning ritual.*

My mom drank tea all the time when I was little and one of her favorites was Constant Comment. Seeing the familiar red and black box at the store, I suddenly craved the spicy orange flavor. I bought a box and last night, I drank my first cup in years while thumbing through the JC Penney Christmas catalog and scratching my head over some of their jewelry items. (Ahem.)

Did you know that Ruth Campbell Bigelow created Constant Comment in 1945 and was so named because the recipe received nothing but “constant comments?”

*I make it sound so peaceful, when my “ritual” involves gulping 3 or so cups in a most crackheaded and fiendish fashion after stumbling out of bed and before shoving my kid out the door with a hearty, “LET’S GO! COME ON!”