clink clink clink

Yes, I'm doing this again, shush everyone. Do I look ok? I'm wearing red, I'm fancy. Did anyone else snitch the turkey? It's ridiculously good. I'm a little worried about it. They must be injecting them with something new this year, because turkey isn't supposed to taste like that. WELL. It's a smaller table this year. Unless you count the cats. We seem to be overrun. If things keep going like they have been, we might be having smaller roasts next year - yeah, watch it, Po. So this wasn't the best year we've had. It was pretty spectacularly crap. Nice touch there, mom, breaking your toe for the holidays, I saw that. Still, it's like I've been saying, the bigger the disaster, the better the story. So there was the layoff, and moving, and Josh died, and the dog got run over, then there was the pay cut, the ride in the ambulance, I developed that allergy to all my wool, my favorite patron died, mom's bird was murdered, and now we have the breakup ordeal and childcare issues. But we're all still alive. That sounds flippant, but it's really not. The spectre of Death has been in the wings - but we can come to this table, and sit here together, and eat until we're sick, and drink until Charlie Brown is funny, and everything is ok. We are all here, right now. And that counts for so much - we would claw through the years just to get back to this time, some day. I hope your shirt is absorbent, mom, because I have some crying-on-my-mom to catch up on this weekend. And I made the casserole without onions, just because they make you violently ill and you're tired of throwing up every holiday. No respect for tradition, I tell you.  So let's eat, and sit around trash-talking the tv and listening to the kids sing muppet Christmas carols. And everyone get along, because the pie is watching us.

Cheers.

Week 1

It isn't really week 1.

Week 1 happened 5 years ago. I watched the car drive away, turned away from my father-in-law's front door, and realized that everything had changed. I was standing in the first minutes of a long walk through a lot of years. I think Oliver Stone did a rack focus on me. 

But in this most recent reset, things are easier. Still complete shit, with the lonely nights and detached limbs and financial landmines, but not bleak or hopeless or lost. I'm just hanging around, with the dinner dishes and bedtime stories and laundry folding and bitten fingers from pilling my asshole cat (who is still peeing on everything, just more comfortably). 

There is some laying around on the floor listening to Led Zeppelin, the Black Keys, trashy angst rock, and the Muppets with John Denver.

and noticing that the rug smells funny

And I drew a bit.

Gave up on knitting when I got to the armpits, because armpits take counting and I am too damned lazy. And because the cat barfed on it. Twice. In the same spot. I hate her so much. She's just lucky she's so skilled at tap-dancing, or there would be no reason to keep her.

There is the shmoopy shcarf, which I have been adding a row to every day based on my feeeelings. The yellow was clearly a waste of $2.99.

read from the bottom up

Grownup bed! Slept in! All night! Memory foam causes instant comas. It's magical stuff.

I'm a jerk and I hate my cat

Still haven't had those gimlets. And I'm not going to. Drinking isn't therapeutic when you're the only person around to drive to the emergency room if the kids roll out of bed and crack their heads open on a cat or something. The plan now is to just ignore everything and see how long it takes before I have a horrible meltdown at an inopportune moment. The last time I did this, I made it two months without crying about losing the house before bursting into sobs at the word "avocado". Three days in, and so far so good. I am a bit grumpy, and sometimes I start to well up when people say things like "What did you do this weekend?" or "How are the kids?" or "Do I have any late fines?" but I'm cool. When people talk about their babies and husbands I totally don't say, "I SMASH YOU IN THE FACE WITH YOUR STUPID ADORABLE BABY/HUSBAND," because, as I have just said, I am cool. Cooly crumpling my emotions into a cool little wad and cooly stuffing them into a bottle of coolness. Case in point: earlier today I made fun of my co-worker for trying to walk next to an old lady without her feeling embarrassed about how slow she was, so he was sort of zombie-lurching and pretending to be very interested in the thermostat. Cool people mock their friends and the elderly. So there you go. I'm fine.

Now, at the library we keep the new issues of Cosmo under the front desk, because our copies get stolen by masturbators. I take the magazine out and flip through it from time to time, and it has assured me that by talking about my living arrangements, I can expect psychopaths to immediately come crashing through my windows, ready to throttle me with shoestrings. But I am going to do it anyway, because I am daring and stupid and I have pepper spray somewhere. Psychopaths are here encouraged to stop reading.

So I'm living alone now, with the two boys, and it is slightly unnerving being the only adult in the house again. After going on a manic cleaning and furniture-rearranging spree, I took the kids to the beach, thinking that seemed like a safe enough way to spend an afternoon, and there I discovered a dead kitten in the sandy walkway. It was still fluffy and adorable, curled under a stick which must have broken beneath it from the tree overhead. I paced around for a bit, thought about pretending I hadn't seen it, looked for someone to come dispose of it for me, got mad at myself for being an asshole, and finally decided to make a run for the car before the kids could see it and get upset. There was a box of to-be-donated-clothes in the trunk, so I grabbed a shirt, ran down to the kitten, and gingerly swaddled it up. Ideally, I would have liked to lay it in the forest under a dignified scattering of leaves and flowers, but my kids were trying to get eaten by sharks (which I could tell because they were whacking the waves with sticks and yelling, "RAWR, COME ON SHARKS!"), so I ran to a trash can and laid the little bundle inside with an apology. A picnic bench full of people was watching me throughout all this, so I gave them a Disapproving Librarian Stare and ran back to the water to scrub my arms down with sand.

This was not the best way to start my new chapter of single-parentness. I decided that the next thing to do would be to sleep in my very own bed like a proper adult, instead of cramming up against the wall on the bottom bunk in the kids' room. This has not happened yet.

Night 1: Changed all the bedding, for a fresh start. Po jumped up, purred at me, squatted in the middle of the bedspread, and peed all over it. I chased her around the house with a spray bottle, changed the bedding again, started the washer, and slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 2: Sniffed the bed, got under the covers, turned off the light, and made myself lay there. Managed it for about 20 minutes - eyes bulging, searching the shadows for shoestring psychopaths and listening for telltale scrabbles at the windows. Po jumped up, purring in a comforting manner, and - of course - started to pee on me. So I went running all over the house chasing her with a squirt bottle, changed the bedding again, thumped back onto the bed in a stubborn manner, and then heard a WHAM from the front of the house and sprinted to the kids' room - only to find it was my neighbor closing her car door outside. Slept in the kids' room, because that was all too much work.

Night 3: Put the spray bottle on the nightstand, got under the covers, and read a book until I was sleepy. Flicked off the light. Kicked Po when she jumped on the bed. Heard a scratching by the hamper. Turned on the light, caught Po peeing on a sock. Chased cat around the house with the spray bottle, put sock in washer, got back in bed, turned off light. Heard a thump. Turned on light, caught Po peeing in the closet. Chased her with spray bottle, threw her into litter box, cleaned closet, closed bedroom door, and went to sleep in the kids' room, because all that was TOO MUCH WORK.

Fuck it.

In other news, I changed my hair, because something had to happen to it and I can't bring myself to cut it.

My one and only wrecking ball

The plane departed. The kids cried, then fell asleep in the car. As I drove along the edge of the island in the dark, my brain reached out to feel the cracks of my heart to see how deep the injury was. It isn't safe to have an emotional breakdown while handling a car for two hours, so I shoved my brain and heart into opposite corners and drove home with red, tired eyes. After the kids are safely tucked in bed I can reunite the brain and the heart and lose my shit as much as I want.

Later.

waiting game

I tried to bow out of the party, which was mostly for the men anyway. Nobody wants two people in the middle of a breakup at their birthday party. It's weird and uncomfortable. I explained this to the host, but with some teasing and painful elbow nudges, I was egged into coming over.

By 7:30pm, I was laughing and trash-talking the dart night guys. Something seared into the side of my face. It was the man's staring eyeballs, from where he sat like a basilisk on the kitchen landing. I stuck out my tongue, and he got up to use the bathroom. At 8:00pm, Leif tromped in and announced, "Time to go home and go to bed. 5 minutes, mom," and tromped out again. Someone looked around. "Where's Mike?" I found him outside in the dark, sitting on a lawn chair. "I can't do this," he said. "Oh, for fuck's sake," I replied. "TWO MINUTES," Leif yelled from the toy bin.

When we got home and the boys were passed out in their beds, the man took me aside and made his announcement. "I think I'm going to move back to Oahu." He cried. I didn't.

This is good. This is the sound of wheels gaining traction after spinning uselessly. This is moving forward with a feeling of relief, and suddenly realizing you are sliding toward a drop off. Oh shit, childcare. Oh shit, no backup for parenting, sick days, holidays, grocery shopping.

I'll figure it out.



Turning comments off again.

Beatnik sweater

It is done! A finished sweater that I am allergic to! And it is very unflattering!

After discovering the rogue ball of tweed in my basket, all it took to finish it was some misdirected anger, three episodes of the Walking Dead, and half a bottle of my kid's allergy medicine.

And I totally had yarn left over.

What was I worried about?

Finished objects mean action shots. Which mean balancing the camera on the weird window/hole between the livingroom and kitchen, focusing it haphazardly because the auto-focus is broken, and running down with 5 seconds to think of something action-y to do.

Which is usually the chicken dance.

Which, I am realizing now, makes me look as if I am holding two giant invisible cocks.

Get your goggles on, folks.

On the pattern for the sweater, there is a cute photo of a woman jumping. I tried jumping, too. 

sweat-hurr

So there it is. Done. 

Note my amazing seaming. I don't understand the flailing about having to seam a sweater; it's still just needles and yarn.

And now I have to focus on other things. Like getting this MAN OUT OF MY HOUSE. I threw him out on Wednesday, and he's back again. I got a drunky email from the next room last night, saying how sorry he is and how pretty I am. 

Maybe I should take up pan-throwing. Or archery.

"It's all just knits and purls!"

LIES. 

I am trying to cast on my first shawl/triangular neck thing ever and this makes no sense WHO DOES THIS.

Crochet chain 4 stitches pick up and knit 2 stitches through bumps on the reverse side knit 7 rows TURN 90 DEGREES CLOCKWISE KNIT 1 STITCH IN EACH RIDGE UNRAVEL YARN PLACE LIVE STITCHES ON NEEDLE WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS.

All this because I have determined after 5 weeks of coughing and two runs of antibiotics and two chest x-rays that I am probably not dying of tuberculosis, but very probably allergic to the tweed sweater I am knitting.

Which I have run out of yarn for at the fucking COLLAR. And I can't afford to order another ball of this death tweed for another month. So I'm trying to use stuff I already have for other stuff. Which may or may not also try to kill me. The likelihood that it WILL kill me increases with these instructions.

RAWR.

Instead of knitting, I will jab the needles into this man who refuses to move out.

grief bacon

It's the same old story. You meet a guy, fall in love, get married, have a baby, go to grad school, find out he's cheating on you, get divorced, move to California, take him back, move to Maui, have another baby, publish some books, catch him at it again, kick him out, replace him with cats.

It happens to everybody.

There really isn't much to say about it. I am turning off comments for now.

The tenting

The house was fumigated this week. This type of thing is usually an excuse to check into a hotel and eat a lot of Chinese food, but it becomes harder with 4 hamcats to smuggle past the office. How did I end up with 4 cats? They are like tribbles. I was only joking about becoming a cat lady and replacing Mike with a man cobbled out of cats. This is why I hate the Secret. The author and its followers completely forget the original secret; "be careful what you wish for."

So because we are terrible at making phone calls and everyone we know suddenly became allergic to cats, we were at the mercy of the landlord - who booked us a room at the cheapest inn and said "Oh, and no pets allowed. Good luck with that." My solution was to go to work and pretend none of this was happening. Mike was left to bag up all our belongings and herd cats. He got them into pet carriers, went over to a friend's house, and propped them under an umbrella. Like coyote bait.



When you get booked into an inn next to the beach on Maui, it suddenly feels like PARTY TIME - even when that inn is just across the street from your own house. It was not party time, however, because all the booze was bagged up with packing tape and trapped in a house filled with poisonous gas, covered in a giant purple tent.

The man and boy went off in the evening to visit the cats and let them destroy the friend's bathroom, so the baby and I were ditched by ourselves. The threadbare aloha-print bedspreads and painting of Jesus blowing a conch shell were kind of creepy, so we ran off on foot to find something to do.

The bay was deserted because of an outbreak of jellyfish. We ran through the surf anyway. Going out at nightfall with no wallet and no phone to run down a deserted beach sounds like a nice setup for a horror novel, so despite the fact that we were armed with sticks and dead jellyfish, I hoisted the child up onto my back and trudged back up the hill to the tin-roofed inn to watch Shawn the Sheep on the laptop until the boys came home. We waved goodnight to our shrouded house across the street, and slept like groaning, uncomfortable sleeping things.

The ranch restaurant does not sell breakfast. In a town that has an economy based around the spending of hungry tourists, this makes no sense. We bought pop tarts and milk at the store, I drank about a quart of coffee, the kids went to school, and we arrived at the friend's house to discover that one of the cats had torn out the top of her carrier and made a bid for freedom. Hey, one less ham to feed. Mike was a bit touchy about it, because it was his face-eating hellbeast of a cat that was on the run. I said nice things to my passive meatloaf kitties, set them loose in the friend's yurt, and ditched the man for the relative comforts of the library. The runaway cat was discovered under a bush. By one of the other cats, who also escaped. How we have gone this long without losing either of the kids, I don't know.

And MAGIC! The house was untented and the kitchen unbagged when I got home at the end of the day. That is the story I was given, anyway. Since I have not actually seen any of the bags, I have been holding up every item of food before tasting it. "YES, IT WAS BAGGED. IT WAS ALL BAGGED. IF IT IS FOOD, YOU CAN EAT IT, BECAUSE IT WAS BAGGED."

Men are so hysterical.

Found in donation bin

People dump old books and magazines off at the library. I was cruising past a box of mouldering donations and a magazine on the top of the pile caught my attention.

"Conscious Dancer"

Which immediately begs the question, do dancers have a problem remaining conscious?

Answer: evidently so.

New title suggestion: Semi-conscious Dancer.