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So, it’s been a few days, eh? I had to hunker down and freak out and get over it and move on and take whatever steps that I could. We’ll be okay. I don’t know when and I don’t know exactly how, but we’ll be okay.

The latest thing that had me freaking out was my kid’s performance in school. Perhaps my already keyed-up self was having some perspective trouble, because now that I think about it, a few crummy test scores and shitty attitude toward homework isn’t really all that alarming. But we were REALLY worried/pissed that he kept screwing up basic addition problems and was not able to memorize a list of six Spanish words for the life of him.

I began to think that, on top of everything else that this year had thrown at us, problems with our kid and his learning were really uncalled for.

So I braced myself when we went in for a parent-teacher conference today, only to hear things like, “Outstanding…advanced…gifted.” (I feel the need to stress that I am so NOT a status whore when it comes to things like gifted programs for kids. If the baby can do some extra stuff that interests him, I am happy. I do not think that he is now pre-disposed for “success” and/or better than any other kid.)

Of COURSE he doesn’t always want to do homework or put any serious effort into it. Of COURSE he’s cranky about getting up early. Of COURSE he would rather play than work on arithmetic. He’s a kid. He’s a good kid. And our only mistake as parents was not giving him enough credit.

I know what it is. I know why he doesn’t want to work on homework (besides the fact that homework universally sucks) and why he seems all gibberish and wiggles when we’re home. This morning as we were getting ready, he wanted me to play trains with him and when I said no, we needed to be leaving soon, he asked his dad if he wanted to look at his Egypt book with him. Why does he ask to do these things at 8 a.m? Is he doing that on purpose so that he can say that, technically, his parents never did anything fun with him, even though he timed his requests with the morning rush? Because the morning rush to him is just the start of another long day. Another day where the only time that we see him is when we’re tired from work and worrying about our future. We’re his favorite people and we’re no longer any fun to be around so he tries to push those days away.

I can’t not work and I don’t feel guilty about working (at least not all the time). I enjoy having a career. And the kid still needs to go to school and do homework. These aren’t negotiable. But I guess I need to remind myself to stop waiting for life to get easier because all signs point to “not gonna happen.”

We watched Raising Arizona the other night, just because I had a craving for it and I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I always forget about how lovely the end of that movie is and I really needed to hear this:

All parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved.

Semi-dark days at the moment. While managing to dodge most of the ill effects of the crippled economy over the past year, our little family finds ourselves staring it in the face. It is definitely Goliath and we are definitely David.

We’re still afloat for now, but both of our student loans are coming due. Mine is due now because I chose to take only one class this semester, hoping to maintain some sanity that is so hard to find when I take two classes.

Trying to find jobs when there are simply none to be had is incredibly demoralizing. We keep feeling embarrassed and remorseful for taking the risk of getting degrees, which, I know, is a shitty attitude to have.

I’m pushing my feelings of indignation aside (we did everything that we were supposed to do. we worked hard. we sacrificed. we put in a lot of extra effort. we fucking bootstrapped, for god’s sake. and because some flunkie MBAs had their frat brothers hook them up with jobs, the economy is wheezing along and despite having three excellent degrees between us, we struggle.), for they help no one and only serve to give me some much-needed outbursts from time to time.

No one owes me a thing.

I am alive. The food that I ate today was nourishing and delicious. My family, both the members that I have blood ties to and the people that I choose to call my family, is amazing and full of love. I am not alone. I will wake up again tomorrow and fight and serve another day.

I’m trying to not think about how far away Starbucks is and how badly I want a Pumpkin Spice Latte, so I started reading back through this blog’s archives and my LiveJournal archives.

October is, perhaps, my favorite month. It’s firmly in fall and has all of fall’s best features. It’s gorgeous to look at and the weather is fantastic. Plus, there’s Halloween, which I love, and my birthday (also on Halloween).

30 days from now, I will turn 31. That number sort of hit me yesterday. I remember talking to a friend last year about turning 30 and she mentioned being totally cool with 30, but 31 kind of got her because she could officially say that she was in her Thirties. 30 sounds kind of cute and grown up. 31 is suddenly, “Oh, this shit is real, huh?”

Anyway, one of the best things that I’ve done in life is to start documenting it on the internet. Honest! I never could commit to a regular diary or journal, but for some reason the internet and I were likethis. Now I can check in with my former self whenever I want.

So, if you like, come check out some past October 1sts with me…
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I have a buddy named Mary. She works a few blocks down the street from me and on occasion, though not nearly often enough, we have what we call businesswomen’s lunches.

On Saturday, Mary went and done got herself hitched.

The happy couple, photographed by the baby.

The husband (that is, my “the husband,” not Mary’s husband) was supposed to be my date, but he punked out. “Ugh. I would have to shower,” he explained. So the baby stepped in as my date.

Not to get all Oedipal on you guys, but he was the best date ever.

He looked incredibly dashing but at the same time cool as heck because he wore his Chuck Taylors upon request of the bride. He also brought some entertainment for himself, that cheapie maze game pictured above, which he kept in his shirt pocket.

He also managed to take a semi-decent picture of me.

That’s me, wearing a red dress (scandalous), and trying to fit another White Russian in despite the faint weeping that I could hear coming from my foundation garment. Plus, I don’t normally drink White Russians, but I saw the half and half at the bar, and there was a faint Big Lebowski vibe in the air, so I rolled with it.

We had a lovely time and since it was a special occasion, I let the baby have two Pepsis. Then he sort of…bubbled over…onto the dance floor.

I sometimes feel like, when introducing my kid to new groups of people, that I should put out a disclaimer ahead of time. “He’s 7 going on 40. He has the shit-talking abilities of someone three times his age. He’s into really weird things like Godzilla and Kraftwerk and Detroit hip-hop and John Carpenter movies. He is not at all shy about speaking frankly to adults. He is one of the biggest characters you will ever meet.” I’m always nervous that he’s going to say or do something out of line, but so far (and maybe he’s just still cute enough to get away with it) he’s charmed the pants off of everyone he’s met.

So when he hit the dance floor on Saturday and immediately launched into some Bangles-esque Egyptian walking and The Robot, the wedding guests nearly fell over. As he got warmed up and more comfortable, he turned things up and eventually, there was this:

Unfortunately, the picture is dark but that is indeed my child giving the goat after some very intense air guitar.

But the best part of my son escorting me to the wedding was the fact that he gladly slow danced with me and gave me a sweet little kiss at the end.

Indeed, any future girlfriends will have to fight me for him.

We had to be at the soccer field at 7:30 this morning for pictures, which sucked, but the game that was supposed to be at 8 was called for rain. We headed back home and piled onto the couch with orange juice and maple links, then grabbed some blankets, turned on some cartoons and passed out.

It’s nice and dreary here today and after the turmoil of the past couple of days, it’s a relief to know that life will sink into somewhat familiar rhythms.

The rainy Sunday got me feeling nostalgic, but watching The Clone Wars doesn’t help with that. I started poking around on YouTube and quickly came across some compilations of 80s commercials. For whatever reason, they’re like comfort food. Though I’m slightly disconcerted that I remember nearly all of these, indicating that I watched way too much TV as a kid and absorbed way too many sales pitches.

I call this postpourri. Get it? Potpourri but in blog post form? And, yes, Tyler Durden, being clever is working out for me just fine.

Anyway, I wrote on MamaPop yesterday about the Sundance Channel’s mini-documentary-series Brick City. Part 3 of 5 aired last night. I think I’m a little too cynical to be really inspired by the efforts of Mayor Cory Booker. I mean, good on him for giving a shit and all. I think I’ve just lost faith in politicians having any higher callings than their own professional ambitions to propel them to action. And even then their “actions” are lukewarm and tentative and serve bullshit. *coughcoughObamacough* But I’m really, really drawn in by Jayda and Creep. I guess it’s the parenting aspect. Seeing those two just in it and trying so hard to be good people and struggling with the fact that they’re bringing new people into this questionable world hits me pretty hard.

Onto the lighter stuff. If you’ve spent any time around me, you’ve probably heard me whine about my kitchen. It’s small, though that’s not the main problem. There are three doorways, plus two covered-up doorway things. One was the servants’ entrance and the other I think might have housed shelves at one point. Plus, there’s a covered-up fireplace. The result is the most inefficient use of space ever. The previous owner’s home improvement skills were lacking at best and so his solution when it came time to update the kitchen back in nineteen-seventy-hell or whenever this perversion of home improvement went down was this crap:

That little slab on the right is the extent of my counter space. I do nearly all prep work on the stove and it’s only by sheer luck that I haven’t cut off a finger while chopping on a rickety cutting board perched on one of the burners. If you stop by for dinner, it’s likely that you’ll hear, “Just gonna chop this carrot. *chopchopchop* AUUGHHH OH JESUS. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay. Whew, they’re all still there. EVERYTHING’S FINE!”

Obviously, redoing the kitchen into something resembling reasonable, much less the gourmet pr0n version that I now want after working in this hell hole for 3 years, will require a LOT of money. And if there’s a perfect antonym to our personal finances, “a lot” would be it.

So, since I’m usually trying to make dinner here after a long work/school day, I’m often flustered and pissy and saying many disrespectful things about the kitchen’s mother. This results in some odd placements of items on my part and some questionable uses of space. Some are benign (“Why is the fucking muffin pan in the microwave?”) and some are more serious. The top of my stove houses the tea kettle, a lunch box or two, and my cast iron skillet and grill pan. (I was keeping those last two in the oven but always, without fail, forgot that they were in there and would preheat the motherfucker and in case you didn’t know, cast iron cookware gets hellaciously hot and even oven mitts are barely a match.)

Sometimes, the cast iron skillet becomes a temporary storage space. Like, for instance, about a month ago I needed some place to set a tomato and a new bag of brown sugar and a mixing bowl. Into the skillet went the tomato and the brown sugar and on top of them went the mixing bowl. And there they remained, forgotten, until last night.

I’m not sure what made me look in there, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I was confronted with rotten tomato ooze that was causing weird reactions in the skillet and coating the bag of brown sugar. And a smell that was somewhere between garbage juice and the Allegheny River that one time that my dad, the dog, and I went for an ill-advised swim and my mom wouldn’t let us near the house for the better part of a day.

I recoiled and in doing so knocked over a cup of chocolate milk and a cup of vegetable juice (that’s what goes for balanced nutrition in our house) that the baby had left on the stove. I then spent the next hour transferring the brown sugar to a new bag and attempting to rid the skillet of the smell so that we don’t have Cornbread with Garbage Juice the next time that we have chili. FML.

At the bus stop the other day, the baby hit me with yet another of his non-sequitur questions: “Are people in Antartica upside down?” Certainly, this a pretty typical question for someone his age and appropriately adorable. However, we sort of got into it.

“No. Well, there are only a few people in Antartica. They’re scientists doing research. But they’re not in Antartica hanging from the ceiling. They’re standing up just like we are. The earth is round and gravity keeps everything on the ground. There’s no real up or down or left or right in space, you know?”

“Yes, there is.”

“No, not really. Directions like up and down and left and right are things that people made up so that they can make sense of the world. But in space, where earth is, everything is going in every direction. Kind of.”

“What?”

“Well, scientists are pretty sure that that universe began because of a big bang, that there was this, like, ball of energy and matter and one day it exploded sending stuff in every possible direction and those bits and pieces sometimes bumped into each other and blended and became new planets and galaxies and stuff.”

“Like how Saturn’s moon exploded and formed its rings?”

“Yeah, kind of like that.”

“Do you think you could ice skate on Saturn’s rings?”

“Well, no. I mean, besides the fact that it’s, you know, Saturn, remember how on that show we watched they explained that even though Saturn’s rings look solid, they’re actually lots of bits and pieces of rock and dust?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“It’s like…there was this artist, Monet. And his paintings, if you’re far away, look like water lillies and people relaxing in the park. But if you get up close you can see all of the little dots and strokes and when you look at his paintings really closely they don’t make sense. And like the cells that make up your body, too.”

“Not my skin, though.”

“Your skin, too! Your skin is made up of tiny cells that clump together and cover your body. It’s called perspective.”

“I know about perspective!”

“You do?”

“Yeah!”

“Good.”

I swear to god we had this conversation and only stopped because the school bus came. It was especially timely because I really, really need some perspective right now. Not the “there are billions of people who have it way worse than me” kind. I have that in spades. I need the “I’m looking at my 30-year-old self from a few years in the future and laughing at her because why didn’t she realize that everything was going to be just fine?” I would like that perspective in bulk, please.

I’m feeling rather…jazzed today. It’s kind of odd because it’s all grey and rainy today. But I think the gloomy weather reset something internally for me. It’s been sunny and nice pretty much every day for the last two weeks and that’s just not how we do it in Pittsburgh. Dashing through the rain from the bus stop, I thought, “Ahhh, yes. This feels right.”

I’m probably just excited about being off Thursday and Friday. Thursday my office is closed for G20 shizz and Friday I’m taking off because I imagine my commute will still be hellish. Plus, the baby has off of school and it’s the husband’s birthday. Getting to spend two days in a row at home with those dudes makes me happy, apparently. Ew.

The rain also gives that first real kiss of autumn. I’m so ready for that season to really get here. I’m getting that baking urge hardcore. I have 10,000 recipes starred in Google Reader that I want to try. I was thinking this morning that I might do some hybrid of NaBloPoMo and Tuesdays with Dorie, where I make myself bake one or two things every weekend and share the results with you. I’m not trying to become a food blogger or anything but fall baking is the awesome and since I’ve been having trouble finding inspiration/energy to post here, the combination seems natural.

Yes, I am in the weeds, to use a term from my waitressing days. Lots of stuff going on at work, I’m doing some after hours stuff for the project I’m working on for class (I will tell you more about that later, because it’s really interesting), three freelance writing things are due, and I’m still vomiting pop culture all over MamaPop and shiny baubles on WeCovet. Also, I have hazy memories of having a baby and marrying a guy at some point in the past few years, but I might just be delirious.

Also, the G20 will be here next week and I’m getting, like, secondhand stress from it. The baby has off of school and it looks like I will be off Thursday due to my work building being on super lockdown. I may also take off Friday just because I know the commute will be hellacious. And as much as I respect the freedom to assembly and whatnot and most likely agree with the stances of many of the protesters, I would much rather watch that unfold on TV and not, you know, 10 feet away from me. Tear gas makes my hair frizz n’at.

Because of all of this, my misanthropy gland has been pulsing overtime and I’m currently much more irritated with everyone ever and their dumb fucking thoughts and actions than I usually am. Which is to say, just fuck off already. But in a nice way.

Why, yes, I did just quote “Karma Chameleon.” What of it?

I am cranky today. I’m having a lot of trouble getting work for various jobs (9 to 5, internship, freelance gigs) done and it’s making me alternate between anxious and furious.

So, to cheer me up, I’m going to share some pretty pictures with you.

Do you recall a year or two ago when color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s were making the rounds on the internet?

Photographers from the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information took these pictures around the time when the Great Depression was winding down and when World War II was gaining momentum. The photographers aimed to document the hardships of Americans during that time and to spur government aid.

A few years ago, the Library of Congress put the exhibition of these photos online.

To me and to many others, the pictures were so stunning because they suddenly brought the very recent past to the present. I think if you grow up with color photographs being a given, like I did, you draw an imaginary line in your cultural consciousness. On this side is color and that which I can relate to. On the other side is black-and-white, long ago and far away, and intangible hardships that I could never possibly grasp.

Suddenly, with just a glance at a picture like the one above and those raspberry dresses, it all seems real. You can smell the dirt and feel the heat of the day and hear the sounds of the carnival that might have been a huge treat for the whole family. The kids are most likely well into their 70s now and somehow getting to see them this way makes their experiences that much more understandable.

Now, if those weren’t cool enough, the LOC also has a gallery of pictures taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. They are also color photographs but they are from 100 years ago.

Yes, really. Go check them out and be sure to read about the colorizing process. I’m going to go try and be less bitchy.

So, first of all, regarding this post, thank you all so, so much for commenting and lending your support and understanding. I was literally overwhelmed by all of the people who came out to offer a comment, letting me know that, while crazy, I am not alone.

Still doing Weight Watchers, though a sort of loose version. I adapt it as I need to. I’m slowly losing weight and things feel different this time. I attribute that mostly to my new-found fervor with regard to healthier food. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty frightened by the food industry in the U.S. and all of the icky governmental circle jerks that contribute to it.

So, this time around, going the easy route by stuffing my freezer with Lean Cuisine wasn’t really an option. In fact, since giving up Diet Dr. Pepper, I’ve pretty much done away with all “light” foods. That is, I don’t really buy light versions of foods. I don’t buy diet bread or light or fat-free salad dressings or light butter or skim milk or fat-free cheese or freakish 100-calorie desserts. None of that. (However, I do buy low-fat organic yogurt. Full disclosure, n’at.) I want Food. This has taken some effort on my part because I could eat more if I bought such things, but I just no longer see the point of sustaining myself on edible food-like things, which will inevitably become tiresome.

I’m eating a little less during the day so that I can eat a regular dinner with the dudes. That’s the major change that I’ve made. And you know what? It’s working really well. Mentally, I’m in a much better space. I’ve noticed that I feel satisfied/full much easier. On days when I indulge a little, I feel uncomfortably full and I think for awhile that became my normal “full” feeling. There were a lot of emotions involved, ya know? I would eat past that point for any number of reasons, stress being the main one.

I still genuinely love cooking and baking and, most of all, eating. I’m amassing an insane collection of favorite recipes and even more recipes that I want to try. I just today signed up at Evernote to work on a system of organizing recipes from all of the food blogs that I read because I want to try all of them. (Evernote, by the way, is pretty cool. I don’t know, for my purposes, if it’s a huge departure from the organizing/tagging features on Google Reader, but it’s still very nice.)

I also wanted to touch on a few points that were raised in the post mentioned above. I do not hate my body or the way it is shaped. I used to and believe me the way that I feel about myself now is so much healthier than the way I felt about it for a long, long time. And I kind of feel like I do accept my body and that my desire to lose weight, while certainly tied up in the bullshit that I’ve been dealing with for nearly all of my life, actually comes from a good place, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, I think there’s like…stuff going on in the world besides my ass vigilance. But here’s a (dark, crappy, phone) picture of my cat being forced to wear a babushka.