Brother

I was talking to Stacy one night about Brother, and the guilt that I carry with me for not being a better sister to him when he was small. 

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever forgive myself for the things I did, or didn't do, as a child. 

(And then I realized that if I carry this much guilt, how must my Momma feel?)

Brother needs a job in a bad way.  Brother has a past that is fighting against him, turning leads into dead ends and favors into smoke.  Brother's trying, but his frustration is palpable, and I worry for him if someone doesn't give him a break soon.  

We all need second chances.  Third, fourth, fifth chances, some of us need. 

Of course, when we talked, I said all the wrong things.  I always do.  I forget myself.  I forget the lens through which he sees me.  I wish he didn't think I had my shit together.  I wish he didn't think I'm old and out of touch. 

I wish I'd been a better friend to him when we were young. 

He was upset when we hung up the phone yesterday, and he didn't call me back.  Of course, I was in bed at 9:45; his night was probably just getting started.  I am old and out of touch.  His voice is what I heard before I went to bed last night and as I was becoming conscious this morning. 

He could sure use some positive thoughts sent his way, or prayers sent up on his behalf.  If you've got a moment today, would you spare it for him please? 

Positive

I've heard recently that watching TV and/or staring at the computer screen right up until you go to bed can negatively impact your ability to sleep well.  Last night, half an hour before bed, I turned off the TV, walked away from the laptop, and spent 15 minutes stretching and breathing deeply.  I told myself I was going to sleep straight through the night, that if I woke up I would roll right back over and drift right back off to sleep.  I told myself over and over again that I was going to get good sleep, that I'd awake feeling refreshed and be ready to start my day.  I told myself that I'd have a good day today.

I slept nearly straight through.  I know I woke a time or two, but I don't remember fighting for sleep to come back to me, the way I usually do between 2 and 5 a.m.

I keep telling myself that today is going to be a good day.  I'm trying to not focus on  my frustrations, but rather on the fact that they are temporary and passing and will not matter in a few hours.

Remember when that book "The Secret" was all the rage?  SPOILER ALERT: The secret is that your thoughts become things.  The power of positive thinking; it's not bullshit, it's fact. 

When I have Teh Sad, positive thinking is the hardest thing in the world.  How am I supposed to remember to be grateful for everything I've got when I'm so sad about everything I don't have?  How am I supposed to go to work with a smile when all I'm thinking about is how unfair everything is? 

I can be sad, and think those sad thoughts, or I can tell those sad thoughts to STFU and think about this happy shit over here for a while.  The sad stuff is still around, but I'm going to put it in this cabinet over here until it's smaller and not so overwhelming. 

The sun's out.  I'm going to spend more time in it. 

Dreaming reality

Blue skies and sunshine are dancing on a cold breeze outside my window - I want to go out and soak it all in, except that it's cold out there and I'm pretty warm and cozy right here, with my peppermint mocha coffee and my space heater and my yoga pants. 

I dreamed last night that I had dead bamboo in vases all over my house.  I didn't realize it was dead, though - someone came over, a stranger, and I saw my home through their eyes and then I spent the rest of their visit trying to use my body to shield their view of the dried up brown stalks.  So I got up and cleaned the kitchen mess from where Jimi spent the day yesterday roasting tomatoes and peppers and making chili, and then I moved some furniture in the living room and vacuumed.  And I really do have a stalk of dead bamboo in a vase, so I guess I'm going to throw that out today, too. 

I dreamed also of my ex-husband, and it was a very realistic, very lifelike scene - it felt like I was in the room with him again, having that final conversation.  His hair seemed shaggier, but the height of him, the gravity of him, it was right.  I don't dream about Bob; there's very little from our marriage that I mourned when it was lost, and it's not uncommon for me now to go days or weeks without thinking of that period in my life.  Last night, though, we were in that awkward place where we've called it quits but we're still together because it takes time to undo what you promised you'd make last forever.  We were separating the details of our life together, tying up the final loose ends - and I wanted break-up sex.  He turned me down, a few times, and my feelings were hurt in a way I remember so familiarly; he turned down sex a lot during our marriage.  I asked, in my dream, if there was someone else - he said, "There wasn't before, but there is now."  Oh.  And then he was gone, and I was confused because I was sad and I missed him.

As I was waking, I focused on that confusion - what I remember mostly feeling when he told me he wanted out was relief.  This wasn't going to be my life forever!  I'd spent years walking on eggshells, not knowing what the right move would be to please him, to make him happy, to make him look at me in favor, to make him not say no and push me away when I moved in for a kiss or more.  I was sad when my marriage ended, and I was scared of what that fact meant about me.  But I was mostly relieved. 

Six years later, and I'm realizing in my bad times, my dark cloudy days, I make Jimi walk on those same eggshells.  I punish him for the madness inside my mind.  I let him cajole and plead with me to cheer up and not let the small things ruin the whole day, but I turn my back to him and fall into my tears and think bad thoughts about him because because his efforts only make me feel worse because they don't make me feel better. 

He never does that to me.  I would hate it and be miserable if he did that to me.  Why in the world am I being so fucking mean? 

I may not be able to fully control the crazy in my head, but I can control the way I express it.  I can control the way I treat others, even if I have to fake the funk to get through until I can be crazy by myself for a while. 

Sad

I don't notice how poorly I sleep until I have a night where I'm not up every hour, tossing and turning and glancing at the clock to see if I've been asleep for any real amount of time since the last time I glanced at the clock.  When 7 a.m. rolls around and I haven't seen midnight, one, two, two thirty, three fifteen, three thirty, three fifty, four thirty, five o'clock...it's refreshing, and I wonder how much better I'd be if I could sleep every night. 

When something unexpected and unpleasant happens to me, it feels usually as if a switch has been thrown.  All my happy, all my smiles, all the sunshine - it's turned off and can't be turned back on without a reset.  (Reset = brand new day.)  Last night, it was a fountain Big Red, spilled into the floorboard of the drivers seat of my car.  Switch flicked off.  It was an accident, a mistake, completely unintentional, but it didn't matter - I was wearing Big Red and my floorboard was sopping wet and red and my night was ruined.  My good mood was ruined.  Even though we were headed to hang with friends, I couldn't climb out of my funk; we left after only an hour, and I'm sure I was miserable company.  

I hate those moods.  I hate that I force Jimi to walk on eggshells while he tries to feel out my mood and my boiling point.  I hate that he tries so hard to pull me out of the quagmire of sad, but his efforts only make me sink further in.  I hate that I don't have words to explain my feelings and thoughts because the only explanation is "I'm really sad and I don't know why because it's just soda." 

I'm trying.  I'm trying really hard. 

Typical

One of our drivers asked me yesterday if I've lost quite a bit of weight - it feels good to hear that question.

So I celebrated last night by eating White Castle and a honey bun at 10:30. 

I have such amazing follow-through skills. 

Better

Sometimes I think about deleting my blog and my facebook page and every other internet thing i have floating around out there that's telling the world my business and the crazy in my head.  Sometimes I imagine going off somewhere for days, maybe weeks or months, however long it would take, where no one knows me or has any idea of who i am or what i'm about and starting all over. 

Other times I think about how awesome it would be to take off on a vacation and come back to find that my home has been cleaned and organized from top to bottom, and all of my work shit is caught up and current, and I could just walk in and start fresh, without anything holding me back from my maximum potential, because I can just dive right in and keep everything at the status quo.  Because sometimes, the shit that needs to be done before I can start relaxing?  It seems like too much to even bother with. 

I'm frustrated and feeling unappreciated at work.  I live in a dichotomy of happy/sad at home because the man I love loves me with everything he has but still won't marry me.  I feel a constant guilt for having so fucking much, but still wanting more.  I'm drinking and smoking more, and that's not an acceptable salve for my emotional wounds. 

I'm okay, I'm confused.  I'm happy, I'm depressed.  Life is awesome, life is hard.  It's all true. 

Dark

It's pretty dark inside my head this morning.  I woke at 2 a.m. and had to fight out the dark thoughts so I could get some peace and go back to sleep.  Once the demons passed, I dreamed of Granny - and other things I can't remember. 

Sometimes it feels like the things I want most in the world are the things I'm not allowed to have.  I don't understand.  I don't know how to fix it.  Why can't I just be happy with what I have and not wish for, dream of, desperately want more?

I don't want to make hard choices. 

We don't do Valentine's Day

I'm not anti-Valentine's Day.  I don't think.  I love love.  The world needs more love more than it needs anything else - more love = more compassion, more giving, more good.  Right?  But Valentine's Day isn't my holiday.

I kinda want to care.  I do.  I always find myself a smidge disappointed at the end of the night on 2/14 when no flowers were delivered to work, no cards were brought home, no special surprises were planned.  But just a smidge.  It's always nice to have one day set aside to make you feel special and loved, right? 

I get that pretty regularly, though.  Not the flowers or the cards or special surprises, but the love.  The "I re-routed the plumbing in the bathroom and put in a new sink" sort of love.  The "I cleaned the bathroom and threw in a load of laundry" or "here, I brought you a Moon Pie" sort of love.  Jimi's really good at the "let's dance in the living room" and "whatever makes you happy, sweetheart" version of romance. 

I guess Valentine's Day feels a little too forced, a little too "if you don't do this, you don't really love me".  It just doesn't work for us, for me.

Besides, I'd much rather him spend that money taking me out to dinner on a night when there's not a million other couples doing the same thing, or surprise me with flowers on a day that ISN'T Valentine's Day (when they're like half the price), or re-glazing the bathtub.  Is that unromantic?  Too practical?  Whatever.  It's how I feel. 

I'm going to help you make some new friends.

I'm wearing the "new" found pants today.  With a belt and my shirt tucked in, they fit pretty good; they're roomy.  :)

That's not the reason for this post, though.  A couple of women I greatly enjoy reading, Katie at Chicken Noodle Gravy and Bernie at One Mixed Bag have started a new project called We're Not Mommy Blogs, aimed at...well, let me let them explain it:

...a brand-new community designed to fill a niche that we felt was missing from bloggy land, a niche specifically for bloggers who, for whatever reason, don't have kids.


 We want We're Not Mommy Blogs to be a place for blog hops, networking, and friendship. We want it to be a resource for The Rest of Us, because we are a vastly ignored population in the blogging community and that needs to be fixed. 

This new community was featured today at Living on Less in a new blog hop called Make a Friend Monday:






Blog hops scare me.  I don't know why; it doesn't make any sense.  I'm just intimidated by them, okay?  I know, my crazy is showing.  (Stick around, there's plenty more where that came from.)  Anyhow, so I don't do blog hops usually, but I really like Bernie and Katie, and I think this new idea of theirs is swell and needed in the blogging world.  Check out the hop, check out Bernie and Katie, check out the not-mommy-bloggers at We're Not Mommy Blogs.  Make some new friends.  We all need more friends, right?

Happy Monday, folks!

Travelling pants.

I bought a pair of pants at Old Navy probably four years ago; size 16 boot-cut navy corduroy with a mid-rise waist and a little notch cut out just under where the belly button goes.  Jimi convinced me I should buy them, but I've never worn them. They fit me like a sausage casing when I brought them home - they buttoned and zipped, but just because you can wear something, doesn't mean you should.  For months they were kept in the bag in which I carried them home; the bag would be tossed from this side of the room to that.  Eventually, the bag was thrown away, but the navy pants stayed folded and tagged, moved from pile to pile until making their way into a drawer.  Then we moved.  The pants found a new home in our new home - on a clothes hanger, in the basement.  There they waited, and there they were forgotten.

These aren't the first pants to have received this treatment at my hands.  I've almost always got at least one item of clothing I'm holding onto because I bought it too small or I "outgrew" it and I just know that I'll eventually fit into it and be super cute and everyone will love me.  I still remember with longing the khaki green button-fly soft jeans I wore to my bridal shower in May 2002 - oh, those pants were so soft and worn and fabulous, and they made my ass POP.  I was skinny then, but just starting on my weight-gaining journey, and I wore those favorite pants of mine weekly, until I couldn't deny the growing muffin top any longer and they began to take on sausage-casing status, and then I retired them to the back of the closet.  I never forgot about them, though, and each time my ex-husband and I moved to a new apartment in a new town, I found those pants and packed them away and promised myself that one day I'd be able to wear them again.  I never wore them again, though - I tossed them out, along with so many of my hopes and dreams, when I was leaving El Paso and my marriage behind.

The navy corduroys, I forgot them until today.  I'm in a sort of awkward in-between stage with my clothing and my weight; while some of my clothes fit better (the smaller-sized stuff I was holding onto with hope), most things are slightly too big and therefore a bit frumpy.  As I was changing out the laundry, I was dressing myself in my mind, trying to think of new combinations or items I've not worn in a while, and I looked over at the things hanging and remembered - "Those pants.  I wonder if they fit now?"

Sorta.

Friendship revisited

Tonight I had dinner with a friend I've known for twenty years.  Twenty.  Years.  I'm a little freaked out by the fact that I'm old enough to have people in my life whom I've known for so long. Anyone I've known longer, it's because of parental or familial connections - she's the last of the friends I picked on my own, way back in middle school.  Being with her tonight, it was like crossing a bridge...I wasn't sure how well it would've held after all this time, but my worry was needless - we picked up where we left off.  There are large gaps in our knowledge of each other - life has thrown us both curve-balls since we were last close - but there's still a love and connection there that keeps us joined together. 

Twenty years.  Our history spans all of middle and high school, two marriages, one divorce, five pregnancies, two miscarriages (one late-term), a dozen boyfriends, a million dreams, countless nights under the stars in some local park waxing poetic about where we've been and where we're going.  Twenty years.  The entire time it took for us to become who we are. 

NashVegas!

So, I went to Nashville last weekend.

Let me set the stage for you:

Jimi and I have spent (until this past weekend) exactly TWO nights apart since we moved into our former home on Camp Street in June of 2007.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Every night, except TWO, for the last 4.5 years, we've slept in bed next to each other,

woken up next to each other,

kissed good morning each day.

So I was a bit nervous setting out on this journey.

I was homesick before I left. 
I had butterflies and everything.

But I'd committed, and so I was going.  To Nashville.  For two nights.  With women who weren't Jimi.

IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME.

 

First, we met Dolly in the Welcome Center on the Tennessee/Kentucky state line.

(it's not really the state line - it's like 4 miles south)

OMG and then WE WERE IN NASHVILLE!!!

And then we were at our hotel.  

Kimmie's dad put us up in the Hilton on Broadway between 4th and 5th Avenues.

 We had Diamond status, bitches.

(we said that over and over all weekend.

as in, "Bring me whatever I want. I'm Diamond, Bitches."

[Diamond Status does not equal free valet parking, for the record.])

We parked Valet anyhow.

I've never done that before.

Now, to make you understand how funny THAT is, I have to show you this:

That dented car there on the left?  that's mine.  

What's even better? 

At the fuel stop before this one, 5 minutes from my home, just at the start of our trip

the gas door wouldn't open.  The cable broke.  Apparently it's common on this year Civic.

A Good Samaritan tow truck driver happened by and popped the door open for us.

So my gas door hangs open now.

Like I forgot to shut it.

It's super classy, 

especially when every valet driver at the Hilton tries to close it for you.

Anyhow, views from our suite:

So we got all dressed up (put on makeup and peed) and hit the town.

 This was man made the first music I heard in Nashville.  I tipped him $2.

The patio was open on a Friday night in February.

 There was a cigarette machine!  Holy crap, I haven't seen one of these in forever!

 And then we met Elvis. 


Sorta.

Mario & Luigi was their name.

When we got back to the room, there was cake:

It didn't last long.

 And so then we went to the hotel bar...

 But we got there at last call, and so we drank one and took one for the road...

 ...err...lobby.

The view the next morning.

 

These are the tables in the lobby of the Hilton.

WTF is that thing there in the middle?

No, really.

I can't figure it out, and no one else knows.

Please help.

We had a surreal brunch, 

and then headed out to buy Kimmie new shoes, 

and then stopped by the Antique Archeology store.

I made Kimmie take this pictures so you could see how cute I was.

And then our night got started...