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When we were on our little writers’ retreat in Las Vegas last year, I admitted to the MamaPoppers that I don’t really like much of the stuff that I write. I think a lot of people are that way. It’s like hearing your recorded voice played back to you. Your voice always sounds like you’re 10 and your writing always reads like gibberish and bad metaphors. I mean, there are plenty of times that for whatever reason I don’t put forth my best efforts and I think that’s easily detected and sometimes I try with all that is in me to write something I like and it just doesn’t happen.

This post just kind of came out of me. It’s not perfect, it’s not even proofread, but it felt good to write and I even enjoyed reading it. I actually wasn’t embarrassed by it and told a few people that I would like them to read it.

Yesterday, Lisa Stone informed me via Twitter that that post had been selected to be featured on BlogHer.com’s Voice of the Week column and I nearly cried. It meant a lot to me that someone read that and related to it and perhaps felt a little less alone…or at least liked the writing.

The meltdown that I wrote about wasn’t the last one that I would have that week. I had a doozy on Saturday. I think the lesson that I need to take away from this is to have tiny meltdowns more regularly rather than bottling them up and exploding every few weeks. Less angry, more often. That’s my motto.

This morning I was thinking that it would be hilarious if I decided to become a life coach. My clients would come to me and say, “I don’t know what to do with my life. I’m unhappy.” And my advice would be, “Well, first you’re going to need a cake or three. And gin. Set those aside for now. Then I want you to lash out at everyone for things that you can’t change. Now, you’re going to want to crumple up your face and sob until your shirt has snot all over it. Finally, slice up your cake(s) and dip the slices in gin. Consume. Repeat as needed.”

Not really related to either of those things, I’ve gone back to a full RSS feed. I had originally gone to excerpts last year after some sort of feed-scraping incident freaked me out. Hopefully, that won’t be a problem again. And hopefully you bums will still click through and comment.

Want to hear something kind of mushy and pathetic? The husband was out of town the last two nights, therefore I couldn’t get to sleep. I guess when you sleep with someone most nights for 10 years, not having them next to you is distracting.

Wednesday night, I tossed and turned until after 2 a.m. and didn’t have a very restful sleep. I woke up a little bit later than I wanted to and when I reached for my glasses on the nightstand, I couldn’t find them. I started cursing my cat, because he occasionally takes it upon himself to nudge my glasses onto the floor, which is really just kind of mean considering how bad my eyesight is.

As I looked around, I realized that everything looked very strange and it took me nearly a minute to realize that the reason my glasses weren’t on my nightstand was because I never put them on the night before. And the reason I never put them on is because I never took my contacts out. And the reason everything looked so strange is that I’m not used to being able to see anything first thing in the morning.

So, summing up: tired, squinty.

Before he left, the husband and I had a pretty good conversation about our direction in life. I don’t know if I can say that any resolutions were made, but it was a far more productive conversation than the one we had the other night.

We’re struggling to adjust our perceptions, I think. We agreed that things beyond our predicament are changing. If the economy recovers, it won’t be the same.

We both grew up steeped in the ethos of, “If you work hard and go to school and keep aiming high, you’ll be fine.” None of our parents went to college. But they got decent jobs and worked hard. While they did okay, they struggled and believed that if they had gone to school they would have been in much better positions in life. Building some savings, not having to worry so much during hard times, and being able to set money-related goals and meeting them. The husband and I were never interested in becoming rich, but seeing our parents worry about money so much and the strife that it caused made us resolve to do whatever we could to not live that way. We were going to take off from the foundation that our parents provided and end up on a higher plane.

What we’re realizing, REALLY realizing, now is that it’s not just our resolve and hard work that controls our fate. It may end up that our investments in our education were riskier than we thought. It may be that they/we weren’t as successful as we just knew that they/we were going to be, that we weren’t on a voyage toward financial security, but instead taking a gamble and crossing our fingers. And, you know, I guess it’s okay that we might fall short of our goals.

But we also agreed that things could be much worse for us. We could have no education, we could be stupid, we could be without families that help us any way that they can.

Last night, the baby and I ate dinner on the porch because it was too hot to eat inside. Afterward, he wanted to take a walk up and down our street. As we got to the end of our block, he managed to convince me to keep walking down to our main street and get some ice cream.

“Let’s play follow the leader!” he shrieked as we headed back home. I imitated his hops and robot moves and then it was my turn. I led him in the Ministry of Silly Walks walk, which is kind of difficult to do uphill.

I forget what we had argued about. Most likely the fact that it was time to take a bath and go to bed. And most likely the center of the disagreement was the fact that it was still light out. Because it was summer, the sun was still blazing in the sky at bedtime, though heavy with August and reflecting an almost sepia tone on our street, making even the cicadas sound drowsy and sweaty.

My mom stomped to the bathroom, muttering, and angrily turned on the bath. I flung myself onto my bed with all of the angst that I could muster in my 5-year-old self and cried because it, whatever injustice I was suffering at the time, was simply not fair.

I fell asleep within seconds and quickly dreamed about sliding down a long, long tree trunk. I woke up, startled, just a minute or two later. The bath was still running and I was surprised at how deeply I had slept in such a small space of time.

My face was still wet from my tears and my curly, red hair clung to my temples, glued by the feverish sweat of an early summer evening nap. My eyes fluttered up to see the house across the street. Old, yellow brick and so very, very bright, especially with that lazy sun beating down on it. Its garish warmth did something to me, reset me somehow. A car roared down our cobblestone street and I gathered myself up off the bed. I stripped my clothes off and tiptoed to the bathroom, sheepishly avoiding my mom’s gaze as I dunked myself into the tub.

Last night, we came home and I stared at the mismatched contents of our kitchen. Payday and mortgage due date had come and gone, leaving us with just a few dollars for the next two weeks. In that space, we needed to eat.

Nothing was going the way I wanted it to. I was so fucking sick of our unemployment and underemployment woes I was ready to kick something. How had we screwed up so badly in our march through adulthood? And how much of this was our fault?

The ceiling fan buzzed above me, circulating the same stale air over and over as I grabbed a half-used box of elbow macaroni and a half-used box of tubetti. I knew we had butter and milk and flour and cheese. I poked my head into the living room and said, “Macaroni and cheese?” My husband shrugged and said, “Sure. That’s fine.”

I went through the motions of boiling water, adding the collage of pasta, adding the flour to the melted butter, the milk, the cheese. But something went wrong. The cheese started to melt but then coagulated into a disgusting lump in the middle of the pot. I stirred and stirred and it got worse. It veered into ruin when I optimistically added the drained noodles.

I angrily stabbed at the lumpy mixture with my wooden spoon and for a second entertained the thought of dramatically tossing the whole mess into the street and stomping it into the ground. I can’t make more money and my husband can’t even get a job and I think we’re giving up and now I can’t even make fucking macaroni and cheese?

This is just not fair. It’s not fair, dammit.

I stomped into the living room and dramatically flung myself into the big, blue, faux-leather, hand-me-down recliner with all of the angst that I could muster in my 31-year-old self. “Dinner’s fucking ruined,” I spat, not really looking at my husband from his spot on our creaky hand-me-down couch that regularly shit grease and sawdust and odd nuts and bolts onto our hand-me-down rug.

“Eh, whatever, dude. I’m not that hungry,” he said.

“I want out. Out of this house, out of this city, out of everything that isn’t working here.” I babbled.

He didn’t have any sympathy to offer and we bickered for a second, exchanging sarcastic suggestions in sharp tones, saying things we didn’t really mean but taking sick pleasure in making someone else feel shitty.

I stopped talking and the tears came. It wasn’t a dramatic cry, just a spilling over that needed to release. I was quiet, but breathed a little heavier as I waited for it, whatever this was, to end.

After a few minutes, I felt a little calmer, and the whine of the cicadas outside made my eyes dart toward the window, where I saw the yellow house across the street. Old, yellow brick and so very, very bright, especially with the lazy mid-summer sun beating down on it.

I wiped my face and swiped at the sweat on the back of my neck, stood up and went back to the kitchen. Looking at the ruined dinner, I rolled my eyes. “So typical,” I muttered. “Don’t have any money and I waste a ton of food.”

Looking around, I grabbed a baking dish and switched on the oven, then dumped the whole sad affair into the dish. When the oven clicked, indicating that it was done heating, I shoved the dish into the oven and waited about a half hour.

My son and I piled onto the couch and turned on Jaws and I told him my estimates of how many times I’d seen that movie. “At least 100 times. Maybe even 200.” He was impressed.

I pulled the dish out of the oven and was satisfied with the results. Not great, but not ruined anymore. I stuck my head back into the living room. “Somewhat salvaged macaroni and cheese?” I offered.

Work. Collapse. Wallow. Try again. The yellow house across the street cooled as the sun disappeared for the night.

(Wee warning: this isn’t entirely safe for work or for environments where people are sensitive to nipples, the F word, Rosie Perez, Spike Lee, and/or awesome scenes from awesome movies.)

Aside: I started writing this post and began thinking about how Spike Lee focuses on heat waves and how they make people crazy in some of his movies. Do the Right Thing and Summer of Sam are two obvious examples, but there are some very memorable monologues from When the Levees Broke in which Katrina survivors describe the oppressive heat in the days following the storm, including Phyllis Montana LeBlanc who uses the phrase, “Africa hot.” Interesting.

I don’t know if you heard, but it’s hot here.

Hotter’n hot wings, in fact. We are in the midst of a heat wave that includes such awesome features as temperatures in the mid-90s and freakish humidity and haziness. Those who have not entirely lost their will to live have morphed into bitchy, sweaty beasts or total psychos, doing stuff like shooting up wave pools.

I was telling the husband this morning that I remembered a drought period during my childhood. I feel like I must have been 5 or 6. It seems pretty universal that being uncomfortably hot or cold doesn’t really affect kids. I don’t remember ever cursing the summer heat as a child, but rather itching to go outside and play all day. However, despite my young age, I distinctly remember not liking that drought period and thinking, “I am really hot and uncomfortable.”

We don’t have air conditioning in our house and for the most part, this isn’t a problem. Neither the husband or I like air conditioning and we definitely weren’t trying to deal with the electricity bill that would come with cooling a house our size. Because our house has high ceilings, lots of windows, ceiling fans, and is on a hill, it’s pretty comfortable most of the summer months. But there are some times when it just sucks and now is one of them.

One of my quirks is that I have to have at least a sheet covering me when I sleep. I feel vulnerable without it. (And you know how impenetrable a high-thread count is!) But last night, I collapsed into bed and slept the whole night with nothing on top of me. Nuts.

Our cat is, I think, sarcastically thanking us for adopting him from the air-conditioned animal shelter so that he could endure the summer in a fur coat.

He spends a lot of time in this position. Occasionally, I put a mirror up to his nose just to check.

Before we started living life on the surface of the sun, the Fourth of July happened. I’m not what you would call patriotic, but I enjoy any holiday that primarily consists of grilling, drinking, blowing shit up, and the 1812 Overture. We spent the day at my mother-in-law’s house, where there were babies…

…and swimming with cousins…

…and eschewing the rush to find a good spot to watch the city’s fireworks for some sprinklers and the like in the back yard. Not a bad time whatsoever.

On Monday, I had off of work so I got to go see the baby in action at one of his swimming lessons. We had to sit in the sun to be able to observe and this was when the 95-degree highs kicked in. I endured it for as long as I could, but at one point I was pretty sure I could feel my brain actually melting, so I moved to a patch of shade.

The baby’s actually a good little swimmer and has grand ambitions to join the swim team in a few weeks if he can work on his breathing during the freestyle stroke.

I am about two hours away from a three-day weekend so today I’m doing pre-mini-vacation stuff like working for no more than three minutes (or as long as my attention span allows) and then doing stuff like taking pictures of myself in the ladies’ room mirror.

Something that I’m hoping my running and other exercises will help me with is my posture. When I was a ballet dancer, I of course had pristine posture. But over the years my shoulders have steadily slumped down and forward. Quitting ballet made me less aware of my body, I gained weight (both the normal amount that comes when you begin consuming food after a 10-year hiatus and the extra stuff that I packed on because, well, “It comes deep-fried? Can you put some wine on it, too?!?! EXCELLENT!”), got a desk job where I spend a lot of time furiously typing, and also the regular beatings that the universe rains down on me.

I was sorting through clothes the other day to get some stuff together to give to the Vets and found a dress that I bought two years ago. I remember wearing it to see Eddie Izzard and the husband took a picture of me in it and I couldn’t believe how decrepit I looked, just because of my posture.

I’m wearing it again today and it reminded me of my efforts to stand up straight. Allow me to illustrate.

Standing up straight.

Slumping, though you can’t tell the difference too much. So let’s go for the dreaded side view.

Standing up straight.

Slumping. Also, hey when’s the baby due?

That second side view is from a slightly different location because someone walked into the bathroom right before I was going to take it, so I had to scramble and act like I was just pacing around the bathroom looking at my phone…because that’s far more normal. It also resulted in this picture:

Anyway, I assure that I’m not exaggerating my posture in any of those pictures. If I relax to the point where my typical posture is, that’s what it looks like.

Maybe I’ll start walking around with a book on my head, old school style.

As I mentioned to an exhaustive degree during the Sonoma Grille/Seviche giveaways, this blog is not heavily marketed. So you know that if I’m touting a product it’s purely because I bought it and had a good experience.

Endorsement #1: Neutrogena skiniD. Around the time that I turned 27 or 28, I suddenly had an acne problem. I had pimples fairly regularly as a teenager, but after I had kicked puberty to the curb, my skin was pretty normal with maybe a pimple or two here or there. The adult acne wasn’t severe, but it bothered me. I was especially not fond of the dozens of small pimples that covered my now greasy forehead.

I thought about trying Proactiv, but honestly something about their commercials was unsettling to me. I’m highly perturbed by the caliber of celebrities that endorse their products, though I did get to hear Puff Daddy utter the sentence, “It really moisturizes my situation.” skiniD seemed less…Amway-ish, so I did the online quiz and within, I think, a day and a half the products arrived on my doorstep.

Full disclaimer, I have been drinking more water and eating a little bit better, so that could contribute, but my skin is pretty effing clear now. The only downside is that something in one of the products that I use has some kind of mild reaction with my sunscreen that causes a stinging sensation in my face. Not fun.

About my sunscreen: also Neutrogena. Ultra Sheer Dry Touch, spf 85 (yes, 85). Expensive, but feels awesome and I don’t get all grumpy about having to reapply it. A few weeks ago I wrote to Neutrogena gushing about how much I loved it, hoping that they’d send me some coupons. A few days later, they emailed me back with a hearty, “Thanks, glad you like it.”

So…yeah.

Endorsement #2: Blueberry Boy Bait. I made this once last summer and the husband nearly died of ecstasy. It’s so delicious. It’s called “boy bait” for, I imagine, purely alliterative reasons but I’m fairly certain that it would work on either gender. All I’m saying is that I made this sucker again last night and, well, it’s a testament to restraint that I don’t have a hickey or twelve today.

Endorsement #3: Louie. I know I mention how much I adore Louis CK a lot, but the dude is seriously one of the best comedians ever. Please watch this show. His first series, Lucky Louie, which was brilliant, was canceled after just one season and I informed him of my great disappointment over this in a rather frightening manner. Don’t make me scare him again. Watch the show. Get his ratings high. Please.

You know that site People of Wal-Mart? I’ve never really liked it because it seemed really mean-spirited and I am, as I’ve mentioned, sensitive about the fact that we shop at Wal-Mart a lot.* But I don’t think I can really decry the meanness of it since I generally laugh at stuff like latfh.com and antiduckface.com. So, as long as I’m not a potential target of mockery, I’m cool. At least I’m honest about my hypocrisy.

Anyway, last weekend we stopped at the store and I was wearing this sundress that had a drawstring-type embellishment at the collar. I had tossed some tomatoes into a produce bag and because I never bother with twist ties, I quickly whipped the top of the bag into a knot. When I went to put the bag into the cart, I was surprised to find the top half of my body dipping into the cart, as well. In my haste, I had somehow managed to entwine the drawstring into the knot of the produce bag.

I picked at the knot but couldn’t seem to find where it began. So, I did what any normal person would do and let the bag of tomatoes hang off of the front of me while I went looking for the husband to help.

His facial expression changed from confusion to amused horror as he saw me approaching, plastic bag of produce swinging from my neck. “Could you help me, please? I tied these to me and I can’t get them off,” I said. “Whaaa…Why….Wha…” he stammered, before giving up and picking at the knot. He eventually had to rip the bag off, leaving me with some remnants that were slightly easier to remove.

I survived the rest of that shopping trip unscathed, though certain I would find myself on the aforementioned site.

* Mostly big grocery shopping trips because the average cost is lower and I have no interest in taking on the equivalent of a part-time job clipping coupons, though more power to all of the frugality bloggers who rock that approach.

Remember a few months ago, I wrote about how I was doing the Couch to 5K program? Well, I just finished the ninth week of the program yesterday.

It took me longer than 9 weeks to do the whole thing, there were a few times that I didn’t feel well and took a few days off and other times I just had trouble scheduling it into my day.

I’m also not yet able to run 5K. I’m somewhere around 2 and 1/4 to 2 and 1/2 miles in a 30-minute run. I would guess that I’m still about 2 or 3 weeks away from being able to run the full 5K.

But! I can now run for 30 minutes at a time, which is something I could NOT do back in March when I started. In fact, I could barely run for 1 minute at a time back then. I remember looking forward in the program and wondering how the hell I was ever going to run for several minutes at a time.

It’s still really hard. I don’t think it ever gets “easy” and I’m not sure that it’s supposed to, but I know that I’ve gotten much stronger and will continue to get stronger the longer I keep at it. And the pain that I was in at the beginning is gone now, which is a huge improvement.

I’m not going to lie and say that I love running now, but I like it a lot more than I thought I would. And I would really like for it to remain part of my life. I would also like to try running in a 5K at some point. Hopefully by the end of the summer I can attempt one.

I’ve also been throwing in a yoga class here and there, which I like because it’s similar to the muscle memory and flexibility that I already have from ballet. I’ve noticed that if I run the day after a yoga class, that run actually feels pretty good.

I’m able to devote more time to exercise right now because summer is less hectic at work, so I can be at the gym working out and then showering for an hour without things getting too out of hand in my absence. During the school year, I’ll have to figure something else out, which worries me.

Still not “dieting,” per se. Despite still battling with ballet-era demons, I have no interest in doing any kind of calorie restriction. Small changes that I’ve made include trying not to eat after 9 p.m. and just eating healthier (lots of veggies) overall.

At my graduation party about a month back, one of my professors stopped by with her husband. He and I were talking about Pittsburgh, and he asked me where I lived, specifically if I lived in a neighborhood.

I was happy to tell him that I do and even happier to tell him that my neighborhood has become more, well, neighborly since we moved in over four years ago.

We moved to Brookline for two main reasons: it was still near a grandparent (free babysitting is key) and we could buy a big house there at a ridiculously cheap price. The offset, especially for that latter reason, is that we were nowhere near the central “cool” areas of the city. Despite being only a block away from the main drag, there was virtually nothing within that short walking distance that was worth the effort of putting your shoes on…unless you needed to get drunk, get pizza, get a spray tan, or get your nails done. In which case, you could conceivably do all of those things at the same time. So, it sucks when you want to support your local businesses, but instead find yourself headed to another area of town or worse, the mall. (I’m not diametrically opposed to malls, but I like them to be a last resort. Like that time I needed both a VHS copy of American History X AND some Monistat at 1 a.m. on a Sunday night and good ol’ Wal-Mart was there for me.) (Don’t ask.)

But in the past year or so, my neighborhood has been slowly working its way out of whatever rut it had been in and we’ve really been taking advantage of it, which has been wonderful.

Last weekend, my sister-in-law was in town. After the baby’s afternoon baseball game, we went down to the main drag and stopped at Las Palmas, where we bought fresh, homemade tamales, tacos cooked on the grill right in front of us, and Mexican Coca-Cola, which is the kind made with cane sugar and is so much tastier than regular Coke, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s the glass bottle and the inherent dose of nostalgia that I somehow manage to conjure up, even though cans were the norm by the time I was a pop-drinking American, but Mexican Coke is refreshing and filling without being too sweet or heavy. And when I’m done drinking it, I don’t fiendishly crave another, like I do with regular Coke. I’m satisfied by the treat and get on with my life.

A picture of Las Palmas that I quickly snapped because I'm still scared of getting yelled at by people for taking pictures of them.

After polishing off our lunch at home, the sister-in-law and I went back down to the Boulevard to get pedicures (nail shops in excess may be tacky and a sign of a suffering business district, but having one good one is essential). When our toes were dry, we went down to Geekadrome, a little comic book/nerd emporium, because the baby had stopped in a few weeks ago to ask about getting a beginner’s Dungeons & Dragons set. (No luck yet, much to my growing dork’s dismay.)

We made another stop at Cannon Coffee to caffeinate before deciding to go to the tiny, BYOB Italian restaurant, Mateo’s, for dinner.

All of this on one street, walking distance from my house. (And basically the perfect counter-argument to my farm longing.)

The husband joked that I am becoming the most Brookline person he knows, especially when I suggested that we go to Moonlite Cafe, also on Brookline Boulevard, to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary last week. Moonlite, if you’re at all familiar with Italian cuisine in Pittsburgh, is one of those restaurants that serves big, hearty “immigrant Italian” food. No Tuscan this or fancy cheese that. Spaghetti. Meatballs. Marinara sauce. Mancini’s bread. And lots of it, dammit. This is America! And that was exactly the kind of meal that I was in the mood for.

That? That is the platter of rigatoni that they placed in front of me. It had to have been close to a pound of pasta and I took that picture after I had been shoveling noodles into my mouth for twenty minutes. As you can see, I was only able to clear away one tiny corner of the plate. Obviously, we took the leftovers home which fed all three of us for dinner the next night. Seriously.

But all of these things are part of what make living in a city neighborhood so rad. People can mutter about how Pittsburgh is just a big small town, but there’s plenty to be said for having all of these things at your fingers.

As if I wasn’t already so chamber of commerce about it, the baby wrapped up his little league season last weekend. They came in second place overall, which bummed them out, but the coaches treated them to a big picnic afterward that was really cool.

That’s my kid, just prior to the pie-eating contest. After I successfully pushed all traumatic images of the blueberry pie eating contest from Stand By Me out of my head, I was able to enjoy their scaled down and less barfy contest. Also, this picture immediately makes me go all Holly Hunter-in-Raising Arizona: “I luhuhve him so muhuhuhuch!”

You know sometimes you look at your kid or a kid that you know or are close to and you suddenly think, “When the hell did this happen?” I mean, LOOK at him. He’s all tall and lanky and looking like…a DUDE.

Let me do something really terrible and show you the picture that I took of him on his first day of preschool back in 2004.

It's blurry because I was sobbing.

Back then, he was all sweet and squishy and rode in his backpack carrier on the bus with me to his little school. And he did this cute little overbite thing whenever he would call me “Mum.”

Now he dishes with his teachers about A Tribe Called Quest and places bets with them on the NBA championship (he lost, had to write a book report). He groans at me when I drag him out of bed in the morning. He rolls his eyes and melodramatically declares, “I hate my life,” when he doesn’t get his way.

But he also does cute and funny and sweet things from time to time. Like the other morning when he climbed into bed with me for a few minutes, looked at me with those sapphire eyes, and said, “You’re awesome.” And the other day when he saw a police car and mistakenly said, “Nine Oh!” instead of “Five Oh.”

He finished second grade on Wednesday. I need a drink.