Hot enough
I’m so angry I’m shaking. Mad. Furious. Pissed off. Livid. Infuriated. Frustrated. Fuming. Irate. Hot enough to fuck.
God damn it. I’m going outside to cool off. Literally. It is only 47 degrees (F) outside.
*******
Still not calm. Despite two – now three – visits with the usually soothing, comforting Marlboro Man. GAH!
******
An hour later: STILL not calm. I need a new gig.
******
I spent the better part of the weekend watching movies on TCM: “Ben Hur.” “Key Largo.” “Genghis Khan.” “Strangers When We Meet.” “Brigadoon.” What is it about old movies – layered themes, sexual tension without the sex, men driven by principle and honor – that makes me long for simplicity? A simple somewhere. Anywhere but here, where the trees are dropping leaves and cold fronts push through threatening frost.
I am once again searching for jobs, for beachfront property; I want an alternate reality in the face of impending sweaters, parkas and snow boots. Yet, even if I find that alternate reality, I won’t be able to pursue it for all the ties that bind me to here. Here. I’m here. And if I go ‘there,’ here won’t go away. Here will still be here.
Making no sense is common lately. I’m jealous – unreasonably jealous and hurt – for no logical reason. I’m upset and angry – about events that really don’t matter all that much. I’m beyond consolation – feral in my tears and vanished in my self-loathing – when not all hope is lost. I care desperately about the strangest things. The significance of a pair of shoes. The memory attached to cheap piece of jewelry. The worth of a special, green silk dress I’ve never worn in public.
So I watch movies. I marvel at the tangible, palpable bond (on screen and off) between Bogart and Bacall, despite their age difference (he was 45, she 19 when they married)...the hulking vulnerability of Charlton Heston…the self-inflicted agony of Kirk Douglass…the tormented drive of Omar Sharif…and I am humbled in the clean and effortless beauty that washes over every frame of film. And I escape ‘here’ for a few hours.
I can stop the pain. I know how to self-medicate, self-soothe, self-delude. I know how to get along, to get through, to get over.
I can.
But I don’t want to.
Today’s Shuffle:
“Firecracker” by Josh Turner
“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol
“The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’” by Travis Tritt
“A Day Without Rain” by Enya
“How to be Dead” by Snow Patrol
“Dance, Dance, Dance” by Steve Miller Band
“Hurt” by Johnny Cash
Labels: weather
Acorns
Behind an office building, off to the side of a parking lot is a young oak tree. It is three times as tall as I am which is not saying much, and at the thickest part of its trunk is probably no bigger around than my leg, just above the knee – which also is not saying much, considering my chicken legs.
My point is not to talk about my lack of height or my gangling limbs, but to think of acorns.
This time of year, I hate. Summer is ending…summer is over. School starts. The days shorten. The nights get cold. The trees turn and drop their leaves. Football season starts. People start talking of homecoming and arguing about how the hockey team will do this year.
I hate fall. I think of the season as a Grim Reaper heralding the inevitable arrival of Old Man Winter and of all that has become utterly unbearable.
But I like acorns. There is something encouraging about the potential of an acorn– its capacity to become, over time, grand and beautiful from something small and relatively insignificant. Acorns are hopeful, even in a dying season. For within the acorn lies a promise of something good, something valuable, and I find hope in that. Even when the acorns fall from the branch to the asphalt parking lot, there is still hope. Misplaced hope, maybe. But still...hope.
Today’s Shuffle:
Paused.
Labels: weather
BlinkBlinkBlink
Updated...
this made me tear up. So good.
+++
For the past 20 minutes or so I have been staring, hypnotized, by the blinkblinkblink of the cursor. I have so much to write, so much to do, I am a bit overwhelmed by it all.
School for Muffin starts the 18th. Too early, if you asked me.
Banana starts the 26th. Also too early, if you asked me.
Nobody is asking me, so there you go.
Muffin is going back to the main campus of her school district to help ease bussing issues involving after school activities, including “homework help” and basketball. This will be good. It will. But let me whine for a minute… she will be about 45 minutes from home (last year was five minutes from home) and about an hour away from me when I am in the office in town (last year was about 10 minutes).
School districts in the rural areas are like small countries geographically – they have to be in order to attain a critical mass of students. We are spread a bit thin out here.
Oh – and…
She will be in FIFTH grade. And Banana will be a SENIOR.
This is not possible. I need to get this life to slow down, at least slow down, as it would seem we are on fast forward and gaining speed.
WHERE IS THE PAUSE BUTTON!!!
Today’s Shuffle:
“It’s Midnight Cinderella” by Garth Brooks
“Where Corn Don’t Grow” by Travis Tritt
“When You Say Nothing At All” BY Alison Krauss & Union Station
“I Wish I Had a Girl” by Henry Lee Summer
“You Oughta Know” by Alison Morissette
“How You Remind Me” by Nickelback
“Cheep and Cheerful” by The Kills
Labels: offspring
False sense of control
I need to cut my fingernails.
+++
There.
Now I can type without sounding like a poodle running on the kitchen linoleum. Irritating as hell, that sound. But then funny, when the dog loses traction and skids sideways into the refrigerator.
I can grow the kind of fingernails women spend countless hours and who knows how much money on at the salon. I rarely paint them and typically just ignore them – until they get too long, of course, to type without keying three letters at a time. My piano teacher, when I was a girl, was constantly after me to cut my fingernails. Weekly lessons. They grew that fast.
I remember, once, a young man sat stunned while I cut them. I don’t remember his name right now, but I remember the look on his face while I snipped all of the nails on my left hand so he could teach me how to press the strings of his guitar.
+++
For the past two, maybe three weekends, I have packed up my mobile office, taken it home and left it in my truck. Didn’t even synchronize my phone’s calendar. Normally, I’d sneak time for email – just to get organized again – or time to read over this, that, or whatever. But now – nothing is normal. Everything is in overdrive crisis mode and no matter what I try to schedule or try to accomplish, there is no winning. So I leave it in the garage.
+++
Why do I think I can afford a $250,000 “room” on the beach in Pensacola? I don’t have a job in Florida – from where I sit right now, I am hell and gone from any coastline. I don’t have money stashed anywhere. I don’t have a wealthy benefactor waiting in the wings to kick off and leave me a pile-o-money.
I don’t have a clue what I’m thinking – yet off I go to surf the internet for ‘beach-front property’ on the Gulf Coast. And $250,000 for what looks like a motel room re-packaged as an efficiency apartment is the cheapest I can find. Where is my hotplate and dorm fridge?
+++
Dénouement. I need some.
+++
Today’s Shuffle:
“Down with the Sickness” by Disturbed
“Tell Me What Love Is” by Charlotte Church
“Born to Lose” by Josh Crowe
“Leave Out All the Rest” by Linkin Park
“Flesh and Blood” by Johnny Cash
“These Boots” by Eric Church
“Deora Ar Mo Chroi” by Enya
Labels: odd, random, stupid me
Contagious
Yesterday, as I stared at a pile of paper work that I needed to be done RIGHT NOW or at least before 8 am on Monday, Muffin bounced into the kitchen, hopped up on a stool, opened her “junk cabinet” and announced “Momma! I’m going to clean this out. Right now!”
After I scooped my jaw from the (dirty) floor (that I also needed to get to that day), I watched in total amazement as she took Every Single Thing from the cabinet and placed it on the kitchen counter. She then very methodically sorted through the detritus, tossing junk toys and random scraps of paper into the trash, while carefully arranging pens, pencils, glue (my GOD, we are single-handedly keeping Elmer’s in business, I swear), markers, rulers, phone books, playing cards, tablets and the like into piles. She directed me to put the pens in the re-purposed plastic coffee can, the pencils and markers in the also re-purposed flour canister, while she found places for everything else.
Who is this child? And how do I put her to work in my office without breaking any laws?
Today’s Shuffle:
“Bicycle Race” by Queen
“Underneath It All” by No Doubt
“My Favorite Mistake” by Sheryl Crow
“That’s Me” by George Strait
“Some Kind of Wonderful” by Joss Stone
“Blood” by My Chemical Romance
Labels: offspring
Put up
I’ve completely emptied both of the rolling ‘catalog’ cases that I use for laptop/file transport. I’ve gone through my truck. I’ve checked every possible location I can think of – and still a document has gone missing.
Piss me off.
---
So this weekend should be horrendous. The county fair started Wednesday and I conveniently took a “business trip” to the other side of the state that very day and won’t be back until late tonight. The fair ends tomorrow and I have absolutely NO interest in going to it, despite the fact that The Boy is on the Fair Board and both kids get such a kick out of the rides, games, food and social aspects. I’m really not very helpful, supportive or cooperative when it comes to stuff I’ve come to abhor.
But now, right now, I’ll pack up my mobile office, say my goodbyes to the remaining staff, and start the long drive home…
Today’s Shuffle (Paused. Again.)
Labels: random
Just call me Eyeore
People who know me in real life have chimed in with concern and consternation regarding the previous post, so I believe I must qualify my emotional dumping by completely ignoring it.
I kid.
But really, it has been far too long since I forced myself to write – and let me qualify that, too – forced myself to write for my own blog, which I love and enjoy – or at least I did before going all “radio silence” for so very long. I write all the damn time…email, proposals, email, directions, email, appraisals, email, to-do lists, email…but I don’t find myself enjoying it as much as sitting down, emptying the contents of my head onto the page, spell checking, posting to northerngirl.org and then walking the hell away from it.
I find recreational writing to be a mental and emotional purging for me. Must be what confession is to sinful Catholics? I’m not sure.
I’ve wandered away from that line of thought already…I’m so not going there today.
Something is off balance. Inside. I know what it is but I’m not sure I’m ready to look to better living through modern pharmaceuticals just yet. A trip to the doctor is in order, I’m sure.
Today’s Shuffle (paused, sorry)
Happy birthday, ML (yesterday). I adore you.Labels: stupid me
