The Average Blogger

A Lovely Weekend

It was a long week last week.  Lots of weird work hours, lots of errands and school stuff to deal with, lots of rust to kick off after the congressional recess.  Plus, my parents got a puppy. So the Young Prince has a new retarded aunt. Another family member also has a new arrival scheduled, but it isn't any of my business to go spreading it around and I'm really just marking it here as a reference tag for when senility kicks in and I can't remember what year other people's milestones occurred.

Saturday, the YP's school held a fundraiser for the local library.  The YP took part in a singing contest, along with 10 other grade-schoolers, something like 5 middle-schoolers and 2 high school girls.  He did not win the prize for his grade-level -- that went to some home-school kid who played Annie's Song on the guitar. I am told that the public-school kid who played the piano was robbed. I am also told that the YP had the most stage presence and vivacity of any of the kids performing.  This does not surprise me, he is definitely more an actor than a singer. Maybe next year they'll have a standup comedy contest and he'll blow everyone out of the water.

It was funny to read his score sheets. There were four judges; one of them is the music teacher at his school, and that guy said he was keeping his scoresheets to go over with the kids individually.  Of the remaining three, two of them were close together on scoring the kid -- scale of 1 to 4 -- as 3's on musicality and 4's on personality and performance.  Judge No. 4, however, skewed the whole bell curve -- all 2's, with a 1 for stage presence. The funniest part was that the YP handed me her sheet and said, "Yeah, she HATED me!" in the most non-angry, non-disappointed, simply matter-of-fact, "huh, whatchagonnado" voice I've ever heard out of his mouth, especially contrasted with his excitement-slash-mild-anxiety of what his music teacher is going to tell him this week.  I have to say, seeing that reaction was probably the highlight of my day, because it is an indicator that he has already figured out when to take things personally and when to blow them off -- a valuable skill I still haven't quite mastered, and one that will serve him well in any case but especially if he decides to keep going down this road and auditions are really what he wants to spend his life doing.

I did not see any of the performance firsthand, however, only the aftermath. I was in another part of the high school manning a booth selling my homemade jam and jelly and making my maiden outing in small business.  Very small -- so small, in fact, it didn't occur to me to bring bags or business cards to the event.  Live and learn. I did, however, sell 12 jars, at least three of them on the strength of free samples. So I know what I've got is good enough for people to want to pay for it. I am now motivated to find other venues -- farmers markets, online, etc. -- and jump slightly further into the effort.  Maybe.

After the sale, I came home and mowed the front yard. And looked around and figured it was finally dry enough that I could slide my way through our swamp and into the back field and mow there.

Yeah, I was wrong about that.  I got the mower irretrievably stuck, and even with all 3 Blogger family members pitching in, that thing wasn't going anywhere. 

Next morning, I called a tow service to haul the thing out, and it required pooling all the cash in the cash in the house to pay them -- minus $4 that the guy gave back to me in lieu of a jar of strawberry jelly. Chortle. I'm not sure if it was a pity purchase or what, but he seemed genuinely enthused. He also gave me the sage advice of next time using my garden hose as a tow chain between the mower and the car.  Which will definitely be cheaper and faster, if a whole lot muddier.

After the tow job (or toe-job, as NYAB and the YP referred to it with peals of laughter -- laughter that derived from very different mental images, I'm relieved to report,) I was presented with cards, flowers, a booklet of gratitude from the boy, and we then went out to lunch for pizza and ice cream. Because, yes, as a matter of fact, my list of preferred culinary delights does rival that of an 8-year-old. We also rented Harry Potter 6, since the YP finished that book about a week ago.  He's now on a hard deadline to finish Book 7 by July so that he can see both those movies back to back, the last one in the theater.  I rather suspect he will be going to the midnight premier with NeighborGirl, who is home from college for the summer. I further suspect I will not be joining them, but anything is possible, I suppose.

Once the movie ended, we packed it back up and the boys went to the driving range while NeighborGirl and I went to visit her mom, who works weekends at a restaurant/bar. Turns out everyone else's mom was there too, and the place was absolutely jammed.  NeighborGirl and I had one drink each, talked to her mom for about 45 seconds, and bolted to a grassy area near the parking lot to wait for the lads to come back.

Home again, I spent the evening finishing up the laundry and working on a new writing project that I'm fairly excited about and the whole family isn't sick of hearing about ... at least, not yet. My dear, dear friend from college who now lives in YA publishing let me rattle on at her for 10 minutes about it and at the end told me that this is definitely in her wheelhouse, depending on a few squishy sex details, and that I needed to start writing immediately. So there's that. Between jelly-slinging and fiction-writing, I imagine it will be a rather busy summer. Plus, you know, that whole day job thing.

Can't wait to get started! Best Mother's Day ever!

What Are You Up To?

This is what the next six weeks look like for me.

At work:
Scheduling
Working extra shifts to cover staff shortages
One book project
One special project
Three postmortems
Overhauling the tutorial wiki
Leadership training
And oh yeah, my day job.

At home:
Yard work
Fundraiser sales event
Singing contest coach
Science fair cheerleader
Drama camp costumer/chaperone/chef/coach/audience member
PTO chef/volunteer
School chorus toga expert
Two writing projects
Two knitting projects

With all that, I'm starting to close ranks on other things.

I have little time and less patience for the Internet needy/greedy. There are certain parts of my virtual life that I will never give up -- they are important and sustaining. There are other parts that I know I need to cut off -- am trying to, but every so often I buckle and backslide, much like my efforts in dieting. (I have not actually slid on the diet so much as stalled. No gain, no loss, too busy to care, maybe get back on the wagon next week.)

And honestly? I'm having a blast. I had kind of missed having a real life where people look you in the eye during conversation. Where you can call someone out for excessive bragging or bitching or bratting, and where it can be done back to you. Where there are tangible results to efforts at cultivation. Seriously, Twitter can suck it. Give me a catapult kit and a flathead screwdriver over blogrolls any time.

I figure it's time to start winnowing down what I look at and what access I grant to the rest of the world.  Facebook feeds trimmed. Twitter? Have I mentioned Twitter can suck it? If I ever accidentally fall into a life of leisure I might reconsider, but for now I don't need 500 posts of 130 characters or less about anything and everything from god knows who-all. What I do need is to use that time to explain Hamlet to the budding actor in the household. Less firehose, more fire within.

Priorities, y'all. I has 'em.

Overloaded

So, last week I wound up working til 3 a.m. on Friday because of the congressional pissing contest over spending for a fiscal year that is already half over.  Then I worked Saturday night. And Sunday morning. And Sunday night. 

And lo, I was cranky.

Monday had a moment of brightness: I took the Young Prince to open a savings account and he actually seemed to grasp the concept. I asked what he was going to save up for. He said he wasn't sure, but he had 10 years to decide. The bank lady suggested a car. I suggested college.  The YP said, "Hm. Maybe both.  A hybrid car so I can save money on gas and a college close to here so I can come home and eat."  It's almost like he has been listening to us over time.

Tuesday was the usual whirlwind of school/drama class/swim lessons/home just in time to eat and go to bed. There was also a bit of angst because the YP decided he was empowered to argue with his teacher about fractions.  That does not fly, and he was set straight with absolutely no room for argument -- with his teacher or his mother.

Wednesday I got up at 4:30, did my morning obligations for my job, and raced out the door at 7:10 a.m. to chaperone a field trip to the science museum in Richmond -- arriving at 7:30 to catch charter buses that didn't actually leave until about 8:45. It was a lot of fun, and the YP and I had a pretty good time. He loved the exhibits, he stayed with me and rode herd on his two little friends,  and all was ginger-peachy until the last 20 minutes or so of the (two-hour, one-way) bus ride, at which point I think The Tired hit both of us, which manifested in him getting mouthy and me getting impatient. Yet we both kept it fairly contained til we got to our own car, at which point all hell broke loose and the boy was very nearly tossed back out to walk home.  As penance, he did two hours of math homework -- more or less unbidden; I'd simply told him he could figure out a way to make it up or he could go straight to bed.  Instead he spent two hours working on double-digit subtraction.  So ... yay?

And Thursday, of course, he came home with a note that he'd behaved beautifully. This pattern, it never ends. Fortunately, next week is spring break, so we can all sort of regroup. I'll have more time to focus on how to get the best out of him, and he'll have more time to show me his best.

Meanwhile, I have also been going through my office and packing it up for the umpteenth time in this job, as we are moving again. 

When I was pregnant, my company had signed the papers to move out of an office down the street from where we are now. I packed up my boxes, went on maternity leave, and two months later I went back to work with a relatively new baby/company mascot and a brand-new desk in a brand-new building that shaved three blocks off my commute. Since then, I have changed desks three times, moved down a floor and into an office, then up a floor and into another office.  And now we are moving to a new building, closer to the Capitol, smushing in with all the employees from both branches of our outfit, with all this Change to process.  New commute, new parking rules, new place to sit, new floorplan, new neighborhood.

I should be excited.  Frankly, I'm just wiped the hell out.

Which is kind of weird, because life in general is a lot less complicated than the last time my office moved. Heck, I've even got slave labor to carry assorted boxes up to my new digs -- even if he is a rather short and scatterbrained slave.

So Monday, the Blogger family is reverting to an old tradition and piling into the car and heading into the city as a unit. Not Your Average Blogger will fix up his new space -- a window seat! -- and the YP and I will set about organizing my space, then we will all head over to the Capitol complex for our annual visit: NYAB and I will get updated press passes; we will visit my favorite building; we will probably wolf down some lunch. Then we will head back to work, where I will read copy and the kid will work on his fractions.Without arguing.

On top of all this, I am mulling the idea of churning out 100 or so jars of jelly to sell at a library fundraiser thingie. The deal is I pay $50 to the fundraiser for table space, then I get to keep whatever money I make selling stuff. I figured I have to sell 25 jars to make up the cost of the table, so anything beyond that is good news for me.

And yet ... didn't I just say I was exhausted? Why am I thinking like this? A new swing and deck stand arrived yesterday that I could put together instead and just laze on for the whole rest of the summer. How come that isn't at the top of my list?

Restless Nights

As far as I know, I've never been a particularly peaceful sleeper.  My dad tells stories about how I'd sleepwalk as a kid -- I think he said once that there was an instance where I made it as far as the driveway before they caught me.  He tells of another time he found me going downstairs and when he asked why, I told him I was going to bed. "Bed's that way," he said, pointing up the stairs. I apparently growled and stomped back up.

Not Your Average Blogger tells me I talk in my sleep alot. Or I used to. When we were first married, I'd wake up in the morning and he'd ask me things like, "When did the gumdrop bushes expire?" and I'd think it was a setup for a joke. Then he'd tell me, "no, no, last night you said, 'don't eat the gumdrops off the bushes, those are expired.' When did they expire?"  As time passed, my nattering got more mundane, but no more insightful. A lot of it was mumbling, but he apparently still gets cause to wonder what I'm dreaming about when I flop over and say things like, "No, I really don't think that's a very good idea." 

Work dreams, I bet.

Anyway, I dream a lot, too.  I know, I'm the only one, right? Lovely dreams involving buckets of ice cream. Bizarre dreams, also involving buckets of ice cream. And helicopters.

I don't usually have anxiety dreams.  No finals for classes I've never attended, no teeth falling out. The closest I've ever come is that it's halfway through the semester and I suddenly remember I was supposed to be attending some math course, but I've gotten distracted because things have gotten nuts at my day job.  But I'm not worried about failing the course, I'm just pissed that I've wasted the money.

And then there are nightmares.  La. For as long as I can remember.  The first dream I remember having was a nightmare. It happened in kindergarten. It involved me being on a teeter-totter with my best friend, but when I looked up, she had turned into a skeleton and was skittering up the beam to get me. I'm not sure what was going to happen to me, but I wasn't too interested in finding out.

In grade school, I had a recurring nightmare that witches had set a bonfire in my bedroom and wanted to throw me in it. I lost a lot of sleep in grade school, because I would wake up from those terrified and have to read hundreds of pages of Disney books to make it go away.

The worst one ever? It happened when Thomas was 2 or 3.  I dreamed I was dropping him off at day care. His day care was in the basement of a building 2 blocks from my office. I dreamed that the building collapsed on us, and that when I realized what had happened, we had a building on us, and we were still alive.  And there was absolutely nothing I could do.  That feeling of knowing that my kid is there with me, terrified and confused, and I can barely reach him, I can't save him, I might outlive him, and the only thing I can possibly do is try to hold my breath so he gets more oxygen -- I still get upset when I remember it.  It was so upsetting that NYAB bought me a whistle, like Dumbo's feather, so that when the building falls on me but I'm still alive, I have a fighting chance of letting the rescue teams know someone's still in there.

Well, then there was last night.

Yesterday was a mishmosh of conversations and TV impressions.  A friend and I had long discussions about how people deal with trauma differently, because a third party is going through some pretty traumatic stuff right now.  NYAB and I watched the final episode of My So-Called Life, and all the characters on there had random dreams about X, Y and Z. 

So of course, I dreamed that NYAB and the YP died in a car wreck. 

I wasn't in the wreck, I was at work and someone called to tell me they were gone.  It was bizarre. I don't know if the dream was showing me how I'd deal with trauma, or if it was telling me my priorities are all screwed up, or what, because my reaction to this was, "Uhm? Oh. Well... I need to make this deadline, but then I'll come right over and figure out what to do."  Because, what, they're dead, they aren't going anywhere and my company still has an obligation to clients? I don't know. 

The weird thing about the dream was that I was so incredibly analytical about everything. I finished my work. I cleaned out my desk. I packed up my car. I went to the hospital and yes, it was real, it had really happened. I called my parents. I wrote down all the bank account and bill information.

And then I just sat in my very quiet living room and thought, and thought about what I should do next. Because I had realized that I could do absolutely anything and it wouldn't matter a bit. I could burn my house down, and I wouldn't feel it. I could shoot up heroin, or I could shoot myself in my right hand and never type again, or I could eat several buckets of ice cream, and it wouldn't matter.

Because what had mattered didn't exist anymore, and that meant, for all intents and purposes, that I didn't either.

And then I woke up in a total horrified panic.  Frankly, having a building fall on me was easier.

Of course, I have no idea how I'd really react to such a thing. I refuse to believe such a horrible thing could happen. Believing it's possible makes it more possible, you know? Besides, I've seen NYAB drive, and as far as this family goes, he's NOT the one most likely to die in a car wreck. Based on how I've seen those around me cope with things, I suspect that I would move back to the family farm, buy about a thousand dogs and refuse to deal with people ever again, except one trusted veterinarian.

Urgh.  Maybe I need to start drinking before bed.

 

And More Projects

So, I went to Goodwill.  And then I looked at my basement and realized I have at least one more carload of junk I can drop off there. 

I got another six rows done on the baby blanket. Only, oh, 120 or more to go.

I attached the safety net to the trampoline. And realized there are also anchors I should put in -- even though the ground is like pudding right now -- and then realized I can't get the spikes planted all the way down -- even though, yes, the ground is like pudding right now. There's also a ladder. For a trampoline that doesn't even come up to my hip bone.  Whatever.

You'll notice I'm still assiduously avoiding the yard work angle.

I read some of my dad's book last night during the Young Prince's swim lesson. Only 15 more pages left in that chapter. Then I have to type all my hard-copy fixes into the Word file.

Tonight I will read more while the YP is in drama class. And then I will put it away and throw the kid and myself in the pool to practice kicking.  He's far and away the best swimmer in his class, but he still can't swim 25 yards without dropping dead about 2/3 of the way, and that's what is needed to get to the next level.  So we are going to work him twice as many times a week.  Build up those lungs. Build up those legs.  And soon my threats of kicking his ass when he misbehaves will be for naught.

And, oh, how he misbehaves.  It's a total pattern now.  Six schooldays of great behavior, one day of total fucking Japanese nuclear meltdown. And those days come harder and harder, because of course the six days become the expected norm.  It's hard for him. It's hard for his teacher. It's hard for us.

We hit a new low point today, when he told me he'd rather just stay in bed, because school has too many rules and he would just screw it up anyway because that's just who he is. 

Sigh.

Well, I started out sympathetic. That certainly is not who he is, look at all the good scores last week. And yeah, it's hard, but he isn't dumb, he knows what he needs to do and how to do it. 

He didn't care.

I got firmer and told him that there were plenty of times his dad and I would just as soon stay home and watch movies all day, but we still go to work. Obligation. Responsibility. Challenges. Not letting That Thing beat you down, whatever That Thing is.

He growled at me.

I snapped back at him that OK, if he really wanted to play it that way, he could bloody well stay home and I'd be his teacher and he'd just see about rules and work and expectations. I was more than happy to kick him outside to pick up sticks and dig holes and then come in and do hours upon hours of math problems.

That got him up. Also stomping mad, but I was done, I left him to get dressed. Unfortunately, that meant that when Not Your Average Blogger stumbled into his room, he got a screaming earful from the kid -- pretty much just for saying good morning. 

Which meant the kid got a screaming earful from me. Shouting and recriminations and sonic blasts from all sides.  I can't imagine what the neighbors must have thought.

Though I bet they were glad when I went out to set up the trampoline screen, because then it was only one person hollering, albeit with more cussing.

By the time the schoolbus showed up, things had evened out. He was resolute, I was encouraging, all that parenting stuff seemed to be on an upswing. 

Which means either he'll come home this afternoon in black despair or he'll come home with perfect marks, and everything will be just peachy til next Wednesday.

Harumph.  I still foresee yard work in his future. And math.

 

Projects

This weekend, I cleaned my house.  Big deal, right?

Well, sort of.  This was a hardcore cleaning. I emptied all the cabinets and scrubbed them and put in new shelf liner. I have an SUV full -- and I mean, FULL -- of stuff to take to the Salvation Army. I gave away two fairly large pieces of furniture.

It feels good.

There are, of course, the usual problems with spring cleaning -- its ephemeral nature, for one thing.  I'll come home tonight to find mud tracked all over the floors that are sparkling right now.  Another problem: I have no more stall tactics left and it is time to tackle the outdoor maintenance -- also incredibly ephemeral in nature, since flowers wilt and plants die and I swear to god those leaves NEVER stop falling all year long.

Will you castigate me as a bad parent if I admit that I still haven't put up the screen on the kid's trampoline? I mean, he hasn't fallen off. No harm there, right?

I have to power-wash and waterproof our deck, steps, and some other wooden yard fixtures. I have gazillions of flowers I want to plant. (Which also means buying them.) Brush piles to move.  Landscapers to call because I absolutely can not fathom how to cut down the giant tree next to our garage without losing power lines or roof or driveway asphalt or some such.  Etc. etc.

And that list just came from stumping around the yard for 15 minutes last week. Lord knows what else I'll find that NEEDS immediate attention when I actually start delving into this stuff.

Even worse was that spring cleaning uncovered all my half-completed, long-forgotten indoor projects.  Right now I have more than 3 dozen recipes to transfer to my cooking blog. I have several stories waiting to be posted on my genealogy blog. I still haven't finished editing the second revision of the second chapter of the book my dad's writing. I have a half-knitted scarf and a 1/4-completed baby blanket I need to finish crocheting before the baby graduates from medical school.

And don't even get me started on all the stuff in my purse.

A half-hour a day on each of those -- would probably mean losing 2.5 hours of sleep.  Sigh. Maybe the best idea is to start all that after a little nap?

Letting Things Go

I've always been a checklist kind of person. I like recipes. I like magazines with bullet points. I like clear, ordered instructions.  Although I wasn't always the kind of person who kept actual hand-written lists of movies to see or albums to buy, I always had a mental tallysheet, at the very least. It's only as I got older and had to remember more stuff that I started writing it all down.

One of the lists that I never get everything crossed off of is my Stuff Around the House list.  Between the yard work and the house work -- and the tasks in both those areas that have to be done over and over, like mowing and weeding and laundry and dishes -- it's a sort of depressing list to contemplate. I like to sleep late on weekends, so that means by the time I'm ready to tackle the list, the day is half over and the sun is going down and someone at work needs something and look, there's a really good movie on TV.

I've been watching the federal government not manage to do its job of allocating funds for fiscal 2011, (which will be half-over on April 1, I'd like to point out,) and I find myself in a constant mood of disgust -- no surprise, but disgust -- at people who can't get the fundamentals out of the way.

Well, then I look at my lists and wonder if perhaps I'm throwing a few stones in my extremely untidy glass house. 

This weekend was the worst for it in a while. Friday night, I could have done laundry. But the kid had a sleepover at a friend's house, so NYAB and I bolted for a grownup movie. (The King's Speech -- very well done and I liked it a lot -- some excellent moments to convey relationships and how some historical players must have seen other historical players, if a little light on the broad historical points.)  Saturday,  I could have done yard work, but we ran a zillion non-essential errands instead and went to a party Saturday night.  Yesterday, I could have cleaned out my kitchen cupboards, but we went into DC and did the tourist thing with friends we see all the time on Facebook, but have only met once before in real life, and that was over a year ago.

And you know what? It was fricking awesome. Hey, the soul needs feeding too, right?  Maybe I should make a list for that. I'm a little grossed out by my living room, but I had such nice times ignoring it that I'm choosing to overlook the fact that there are 3 different TV remotes in 3 different corners of the room at this particular moment. 

To put a dent in things, I did manage to get up and do 2 loads of laundry while getting out my morning newsletters today.

I think I'm going to revisit my list and break it down into tasks that can be accomplished in 2 hours or less.  Instead of "consolidate all the brush piles into one and call a tree guy to mulch it all,"  I can change that to "move three cartloads of branches a day until all the branches are consolidated."

Yay!  A longer list! But with more items to cross off. If I put all the remotes in a basket when I get up from here and head to the laundry room, that'll be the first job done!

L-7

In the past month:

The YP didn't get into a play he auditioned for.

I didn't get a job I interviewed for.

NYAB and I went to a casino and while we didn't lose all we'd allotted, we didn't come out ahead, either.

But here's the thing.  Doing all that stuff?  Way worth the loss. Sure, a different outcome would have been nice, but things are pretty good as they stand, and the experiences were educational and heartening.  Getting there was more than half the fun.

I'm having a harder time remembering that about the everyday aspects of living, I'm sorry to say.

The kid's school experience is just full of peaks and valleys, but the valleys seem a bit deeper now. We get fewer reports of problems, but what we do hear about is more extreme. Like he saves it all up and lets fly with one really horrible day, as opposed to one or two daily mishaps spread over the course of a few days.

Meanwhile, my job is less volatile, but I think I'm under sea level more than I'm over it these days, and that makes it harder to stomach the really bad things when they pop up out of nowhere. Fortunately, most of those really bad things spring from areas where I have no control and/or the impact on me is minimal, but it's still just more noise to deal with.

And at home? I'm trying to figure out what to do for my birthday. Originally I was supposed to spend my birthday in a leadership training seminar at work, but it got rescheduled. I suppose pretty much anything will be an improvement on that. NYAB had one plan that got a flat refusal from other quarters, and I'm sort of all over the place about it. I understand, but I'm irritated. I'm not surprised, but I'm disappointed for NYAB, who basically had his first effort at doing this sort of thing stomped on. I'm probably a little relieved as it lessens the impact of future criticisms from those quarters, but I'm also overreacting in my internal insistence that it'll be more fun without them anyway. So, yeah, I don't know where that lands me overall. Oh, well.

On the plus side, my birthday is also is a harbinger of warmer weather, which considerably brightens moods around here. So glad February is out the door as of this evening!

I Gotcher Quarter Rightchere.

So, a couple of weeks ago, the kid got busted for cussing in school.

The details are really a testament to how much things have changed since my day. Poor YP.  He dropped a book in the library and lost his place and apparently muttered, "Aw shit."  Some other kid heard him and immediately hopped up to tattle. The YP got upset and started loudly asking the kid to let it go.

The kid didn't. The librarian -- who didn't even hear it firsthand -- got the YP to confess to both crimes and was scandalized. So the kid got punished twofold.

He did not get punished at home. Frankly, we think he is to be commended for not busting the little rat's kneecaps during recess.

However, we have implemented new policies to curb the impulse. We cuss in Brit slang. We make up new phrases, or find quaintly ridiculous old ones. We have created a cussing jar. One quarter per infraction. There have been a couple glitches -- one when we had to use the jar for one of the YP's science experiments and all the money in it mysteriously disappeared, and one when we had to go digging through the car for quarters.

It was more or less working, though, until Saturday. Not sure why, but it was a particularly cussy day. Not Your Average Blogger was sick, and the YP was being a little more heedless than usual. He'd drop something, cuss, I'd tell him to get a quarter. Something would go wrong in a video game, he'd cuss, I'd tell him to get a quarter.  Someone would do something surprising on TV, he'd cuss, I'd tell him to get a quarter.

None of this cussing was violently angry, mind. It was all very much in keeping with his father's and my bad habits.

As was his ultimate reaction.  After the third incident, he went to his bank, came over to me with two dollars and said, "Here, Mom. Just take this for the rest of today. OK?"

I refused, but after he left the room to put it back I could not stop laughing.

We have decided that the money collected in this thing will go to buy an item at Christmas for Toys for Tots.

Some kid may be getting an island from Santa.

Genetic Misanthropy

When I was a kid, I had scads of friends, and we all lived fairly close together. I was always off at someone else's house, or someone was at mine. At the time, I couldn't really understand how my parents didn't function in much the same way. They had an extremely small circle of friends, and rarely, it seemed to me, did they have much in the way of a social life.

Looking back, they were a lot more outgoing than I am now. While it was pretty much the same three or four people on the roster every weekend, there were people around. At the same time, I was a lot more social in second grade than the Young Prince is.

I wonder what happened?

Part of it is me. One of the most freeing things I've done in months was to close out the old year by hacking my blog reader back and ditching feeds to several blogs I realized only served to raise my blood pressure and get me all fired up and righteously indignant. Tell you what, I haven't missed the breathtakingly ignorant alternative viewpoints nor the insipid "inspirational" stories one bit. I hid a lot of people on Facebook. I have pretty much given Twitter up for dead at this point as I find I don't have much to say and I don't care at all what some casual acquaintance had for lunch, snack, appetizer or dinner, unless they have found a way to make such posts amusing or at least informative to my existence, like, "Do NOT eat at Joe's unless you want to spend the next 5 hours barfing."  I realize being anti-social sort of defeats the point of social media, but I find myself much less irritated all around having taken these steps.

The thing is, that Virtual Reality attitude is extending to Actual Reality as well. Or maybe it started there, I've lost track. But these days I am much happier spending the weekend sprawled on our couch knitting or reading or watching movies than I am at the prospect of getting up, putting on clothes that have actual waistbands, and going out somewhere to talk to people. I still have Christmas gifts I haven't managed to deliver to the family who lives two houses over. And worse, I don't feel completely guilt-ridden and torn up about this. I know the way to get people to come to my house is to go to theirs and extend the invitation, but ... well, I'm sure that would be a fine thing, if I were at all inclined to put on my shoes. Which I'm not. Let them put theirs on and come here!   

Part of this is geography, I know. I spend 90 percent of my waking hours 40 miles from my house, and even if WorkFriends were inclined to hang out with us in off hours, it is rather a long haul to meet up. Conversely, I almost never see any of my neighbors (especially in winter, when there is no commonality of yard work to get us all out and waving to each other,) so the chances to really connect and become Every Weekend Friends are few and far between. The YP's friends all live several miles away, and not the sort of miles that can be traversed by bicycle.

So it is always surprising to me when we wind up with weekends full of outings and people and what-all. This weekend the family wound up with four -- count 'em, four -- different Plans With Friends. The YP had a party on Saturday and is going to hang with a classmate today. Friends of ours are moving up from New Orleans and were in town this weekend, and they were over for dinner last night. A woman I used to work with who lives even farther in the boonies than we do stopped by this morning with her family for breakfast and a hand-me-down-kid-clothing swap.

And it was all quite lovely and enjoyable. Completely wonderful, "wow, we should do that more often" kind of nice. So why don't we?

I remember having the same sort of relationship with Chinese food when I was in college. I'd be sitting in the dorm and someone would say, "Let's go to Chinatown and eat at Hop Li's!" And I'd think, "ohhh, god. I'd have to find pants. And then hike to the parking structure. We have to drive there -- at dinnertime, in LA -- and THEN we have to find parking. And ... ehhhhh."  But then, every time I actually got up, got dressed, went and did it, by the middle of the meal I couldn't understand why I didn't do this every single night of the week. That food was beyond compare! And the service was amazing! And it was completely reasonably priced!

I have yet to figure out what the problem is. Lack of energy? Lack of motivation? An object at rest and all that? Maybe I'm like my parents and have an equally small social circle, but the diaspora covers a larger geographical area?

I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. I guess I should try harder to work on that?

Well, maybe. I've got an awfully big backlog on Netflix Instant View to get through.