Regrets, I have a few...

This past weekend saw a gathering of a group of friends who are scattered across North America. I started to read a report of how it went, but I couldn't get past the list of attendees before I had to shut it down. Once upon a time I would have been there, or at least been on the receiving end of a group phone call if circumstances prevented me from being there. I'd be a big, fat liar if I claimed I wasn't heartbroken not to be part of that anymore.

Now I want to spend the rest of the day being emo and sulking about it. But I won't, because I'm beginning to pride myself on finally being a grown-up, and part of being a grown-up is learning to let go, to accept the consequences when you do dumb things, and to recognize that sometimes, painful things are still for the best. And I know deep down that this really is for the best. I made a lot of compromises to my beliefs and my behavior when I hung with that crowd. Not that they're bad people -- they're fantastic people. Their beliefs and values just don't always jibe with my own, and it was hard for me not to compromise parts of myself for the sake of being accepted and deemed "cool." So letting it go to my head and subsequently getting myself deemed "butthole" and almost universally rejected... yes, painful, in that soul-crushing, life-altering kind of way. But ultimately good for my character. The most valuable life lessons do have an annoying way of being the most painful.

Anyway. Chicken salad has been consumed, and 'twas most yum. Now I'm going to shake this off and hie myself to work.

Maybe I'm just warped by too much Food Network and HGTV.

We had a cozy, long weekend, in which a lot of sleeping, snuggling, and lazing about was mingled in there with the chores and whatnot. I've decided that one of the days I like best about having extra time off is the luxury of being able to take my time with food preparation. I actually enjoy cooking and being all domestic when it's not rushed and when I don't feel like it's taking up too much of the only real day off I'll get all week. You know, I hate to seem all un-feminist and old-fashioned, but I can get totally psyched about the idea of becoming a domestic diva. I only dislike cooking and cleaning and decorating and general home maintenance when I'm trying to squeeze it into two days a week, which is when it becomes overwhelming. But I know I'd love getting to stay home and focus on all that stuff full-time. I know I'd never get bored. I'd always have twenty projects going at a time, as I'm wont to do anyway.

I guess it's a good thing I'm looking forward to eventually becoming a housewife, since the other day Matt dropped a bit of a bomb with the off-handed mention that he hopes we'll be able to homeschool our hypothetical future kids. Far from being the stink-bomb that you'd expect, it was actually a pleasant surprise, and a relief--I'd been thinking the same thing, and figured it would take some convincing to get him to agree. But hey! He's already there! Further proof that he's SO the guy for me.

Why on earth would I want to homeschool? It's not so much that I'm entirely down on the public school system, or that I have anything but the utmost admiration and respect for teachers. But my own experiences with public school were pretty dismal all the way around. A lot of that simply had to do with the times. My teachers couldn't very well be expected to recognize that I had a learning disorder when nobody had even heard of ADD. But the labels I got instead -- smart but lazy, stupid and lazy, bad kid, bad student, underachiever, full of wasted potential -- those labels did a lot of damage. A lot of teachers slapped that label on me the first day of class and then dismissed me as hopeless for the rest of the semester. And I got bullied relentlessly throughout my entire school career because those labels, combined with ADD-related behaviors I had no idea how to control, caused me to stand out as an easy target.

So, yeah. I don't want any part of that for my hypothetical future kids.

Of course, if we're going to homeschool, one of us has to be home full time, and we'd already talked about how if we have kids I'd like to be a stay-at-home mom. So I guess it'll fall to me. I hope it falls to me, that Matt's eventually able to get a job that will make all of this possible. Not that I plan to let him bring home ALL of the bacon, mind. I'll still write, and I still plan to take the web design training, and I'm still kicking around ideas for eventually going pro with the knitting, for whatever income that's worth. And I realize that none of this is new, some epiphany I've had since getting married that I want to be the happy little homemaker. It's always been my fondest dream to work from home, keep my own hours, and unleash my inner Martha Stewart Sandra Lee in my spare time. I'm just grateful as heck that I've found myself a partner who's on board with all of that.

Me, a Guest Blogger

Adult ADD and Money posted a short essay by yours truly on how I trained myself to be (more or less) financially responsible.

At Least It's Not Fescue

I was in a weird mood yesterday. I didn't sleep well the night before, and as it tends to do, sleep deprivation made me introspective. Sometimes, introspection makes me all nostalgic. Such was the case yesterday. It was the kind of mood that gets me to sign onto Classmates.com under the pseudonymous account I've set up there (99% of the time I don't give a squirrel's nut about 99% of the people I went to high school with, and I don't want any of them to know about the 1% of the time that curiosity gets the better of me) and see if I can glean any news about the 1% of schoolmates with whom I was actually on friendly terms. It was that mood that also got me to Google the rock band of This Girl I Once Knew.

I knew This Girl in college -- my first attempt at the U of OK when I was actually college-age, not my more recent and successful return. She didn't actually go to school there, but she was the good friend of a good friend who did, and she and I were friendly by association, hanging out with the same people, going to the same parties, sometimes even hanging out with each other. She was one of those Fabulously Cool types, all cultured and well-travelled and ueber-talented and always gorgeously put together, who made me feel like a completely inadequate dork poseur. I never felt I could truly be friends with her because I felt like I could never be cool enough for her. Not that she ever said or did anything to make me feel that way, mind; she was also a genuinely sweet person with a fun and self-depracating sense of humor. But she gave such an impression of being so much more than adequate at everything she did that all I could see when I was in her presence were my own faults and how I failed to measure up.

Taking all of this into account, I should have taken her a little more seriously when she said she was going to start a rock band, and not been so surprised when it actually turned out to be somewhat successful. But you know how it is when your friend says s/he's going to start a rock band--90% of the time you both know that it's just wishful thinking, and if they do go so far as to actually assemble a group of musicians, they probably won't make it out of their parents' garage. But This Girl is someone who actually does the things she sets her mind to. Before long, she and her critically-acclaimed local band were packing up and moving to LA to be bona fide rock stars--headlining at famous LA clubs, national tours, rabid groupies, the whole works. We kept in sporadic touch via e-mail, and I tried to keep up with the band's doings, but somewhere in there we lost touch, as I had already lost touch with most of the rest of our friends from those days.

I haven't checked up on her or her band in years, or given either that much thought, until yesterday. For some reason, she was on my mind. So I plugged TGIOK's band name into Google. What I learned is that the band is now defunct. She's living in north Cali and is starting a solo career, and also has a few other creative and business ventures going. She appears to be doing well, and also appears to be even more fabulous than ever.

Somehow, this news bummed me out. Not that I'm not thrilled for her and her successes; but just as I did back in the day, I suddenly find myself using her extraordinary life as a measuring stick for my own ordinary self, and coming up wanting. She's a few years my junior, which just adds to my sense of failure and mediocrity. She's thirty now, and spent her twenties living a dream and building a great life for herself. I spent my twenties floundering and struggling to figure out how this whole adulthood thing works. She has numerous successes already behind her. I have numerous false starts behind me, with hardly any finishes. She's right where she wanted to be by 30, and I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be by the time I got to my thirties.

The grass on her side of the fence is a lush, tropical garden.

But, y'know, the grass on my side ain't so bad, either. It's Bermuda--ordinary and not that pretty, but hardy in bad weather and still very green and fun to walk around barefoot in. I may be a mediocre wannabe with vague entrepreneurial aspirations who is still struggling to jumpstart a writing career and bring some semblance of fabulousness into my life. But you know what? I still believe I'll get there. It might happen ten years later than that girl back at OU who couldn't decide whether to girlcrush on or resent the hell out of This Girl She Knew ever dreamed it would happen, but it will happen.

In the mean time, I have a pretty fantastic life. I have a husband whom I adore, and a good job that I actually like, and... okay, I'm not so thrilled with my current living situation, but that's only a few months away from improving. I have a bright future. I'm still on the way up, and all of my successes are ahead of me.

I think, what with my ADD-ish tendencies to get really excited about a new idea, tackle the implementation with all I've got and then peter out and not see it through, that I naturally get depressed when confronted with someone who actually has the drive and ability to make something out of their talents, and This Girl is, to me, the embodiment of drive and ability combined with talent and energy. But I know that I shouldn't measure my life by anybody else's. I live according to my own time-table, and I've always been a late bloomer. If it takes till my forties to finally write a book that's fit to publish, by the time I'm fifty nobody will care that it happened ten or fifteen years later than I expected. So I just need to keep writing, and stop comparing myself to other people, and remember that I love my life. It's mine and it's good and it's going places.

The Joys of Non-Parenthood

I had my first ever pregnancy scare over the weekend. Talkin' 'bout good times.

Apparently my being ill screwed up my cycle and made me an entire week late. I suspected all along that the sickness was the culprit, but about three days in I started to get a little uneasy and decided I'd better lay off the rum until I knew all things were as they should by. By day five I was on the verge of freaking out, and also really thirsty for some of Matt's imported beer, so while I was at the drug store picking up various cough and congestion remedies for Matt (who went to the emergency room Thursday morning, since Urgent Care was closed for the holiday, to get started on his own lovely antibiotics, but that's fodder for another post), I picked up a test kit.

Soon after I got back home, nature called, so I gave myself the test. The instructions said that the results should appear in two minutes, but could take as long as ten. After about a minute the negative sign appeared, so I set it aside and went to distract myself for another nine minutes, deciding to wait and make sure before I started celebrating. When I came back to the bathroom, Matt was standing at the sink, and the test was gone.

"Did you throw away the test?" I asked.

"Yeah. You were through with it, weren't you?"

"I guess. Did it still say negative?"

"Yes," he assured me. Then, "There was a plus sign. That means no baby, right?"

"Um. What?"

"A plus sign means you're not pregnant, isn't that what you said?"

".... Crap. What? Let me see that test! Was there really a plus sign?"

"Yeah. Why? Wait, does that mean you are pregnant?"

"Yes! Crap! Get out of my way, I have to dig it out of the trash and make sure!"

"No way," he said, not getting out of my way. "Are you yanking my chain?"

"NO! Plus sign means pregnant! Lemme... oh. You're yanking my chain, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Dude. That's just not something you do.*"

"I can see that now."

My husband is such a comedian. HA HA HA! Except not. Anyway, there is no bun in my oven, which has clearly disappointed my uterus to no end, because today she is punishing me severely, but at least she's confirming that the minus sign knew what it was talking about. All is right in my world.

In other baby news, over the long weekend we had one cousin show up with her son's new puppy, and another cousin brought his baby girl by to see us. Both were cuddly and warm and too cute for words, and any baby jones I may or may not have been feeling lately has been thoroughly satisfied. Although now I kind of want us to get a puppy.

During those few days that we considered the possibility that I might be pregnant, Matt and I had many discussions about how great kids would be some day but that day is definitely not today, as there are so many different ways we want to improve upon our current situation first. Of course, we knew, if it happened we'd have it and we'd love it and we'd both do the best we could with the resources currently available to us; but I know this for certain: as much as I might pine to hold and play with a baby from time to time, when that happens, I'm still all too happy to hand them back to their parents the second they become fussy or needy. I'm just not yet ready to be a mother. Thank God I still have more than nine months to get there.

*My true reaction was somewhat more volatile, to be sure, but I'm trying to keep it family-friendly in here, so it's not fit to print.

Upsetting things

Do you know what's upsetting?

Getting a call from your husband letting you know that your mommy has been taken to the emergency room is upsetting.

Getting to the ER and seeing your mommy looking very old and frail and miserable is even more upsetting.

Finding out that she hasn't been taking her blood pressure medication because she couldn't afford it, and knowing that you and your siblings could have taken care of that for her if she had only said something is also pretty damn upsetting.

But the most upsetting thing is being confronted with the fact that your mommy--the rock you've depended on for so many years, way past the point that you should have stopped doing so--has an expiration date.

I don't want my mommy to expire.

She's going to be taking her medication from now on.

Floating on the Imaginary Fumes of New Car Smell

My head is in the clouds today. Not the useful-to-writing clouds of story space, unfortunately, but the completely distracting and exciting clouds of oh my God my life is actually coming together and look at me I'm on the verge of finally being a grown-up. It's always a terrific feeling when things start falling into place, but it also kills my ability to focus on anything else. But that's okay, because it's not like I get to feel this way all that frequently.

What set me loose from my moorings today was drafting up a monthly budget based on what I believe is going to be my monthly salary. I still haven't gotten an accurate depiction of what this is going to be yet, what with having yet to receive a paycheck that didn't include at least a day's unpaid leave plus adding Matt to my health benefits, but I've still got a pretty good guess as to what I'll be bringing home. And subtracting all of our monthly bills and expenses plus allowing for factors of the various and sundry kind, it looks like not only can we afford our own place just fine (once that first month's rent plus deposit is saved up... plus professional mover fees, because I'm done being the resident two-legged pack mule), but we can also afford...

[Dunh dunh DUNNNNNNH!]

...a car payment.

You guys. No, seriously, you guys! I've never owned my own car before. I realize how spoiled it's going to make me sound to tell you that my mother has always kept me in operational vehicles, but there's this whole thing about her being really bossy and insistent and a bit of a martyr about it that I don't really want to go into, plus all of my hatred of the fact that I've never had the luxury of being able to tell her no because I've never really been in the position to afford a car payment. So I've spent my entire adult life driving whatever my mom tells me I can drive, and that makes me feel... not so very adult.

And now, with Matt's truck so badly in need of repairs that we can't afford, we have him driving MY car, and by MY car what I really mean is the car that my mother loaned me two years ago after deciding to give the Jesus van I'd been driving through my college years to my aunt (my mom has a thing about giving her old cars to family instead of just trading them in... probably because in latter years she's taken to buying cars from acquaintances of friends instead of dealers; but back to the point). Meanwhile, she's letting me drive her mini-van to work, since Matt's and my work schedules are too disparate to make ride sharing feasible, and making me feel very, very guilty about it.

We need our own car, y'all.

And in the "It's clearly meant to be" department, Nephew #2 just started an exciting new career as a car salesman (a job at which I have no doubt he'll excel), and he's already offered to hook us up with a good deal. I told him at the time that it would be a while before we're in a position to take him up on the offer, but maybe it won't take us that long after all.

Of course, I still have to run all of this by Matt. But I think it won't be long until I get to buy my first car.

Occasionally, being a grown-up kinda kicks some ass.