BLOW Me.

First off, quick aside.  I had every intention of posting this yesterday, but then our power flicked off and on and the wireless router died for the dozenth time this year and then refused to come back.  And so I was without internet, because I refused to sit down like a normal person and plug into the ethernet cable.  Because - WIRES! The weight of it all, the tied-down-ness.  It was all more than I could bear.  Also I was somewhat busy digging my way out of the pit of despair our house descended into over the course of the busy weekend.

So now things are back to normal, the house is no longer in danger of being condemned, and Big Daddy picked up a spankin' new wireless router, thus restoring my faith in the internets. All is mostly right with the world.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled insanity.

I may have mentioned once or twice or eleventy-billion times that I have a small problem with phone anxiety.  

Talking to strangers or even acquaintances over the phone has been known to give me heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and halitosis.

So it was a big step for me to spend an hour chatting with Pete of Fiddley Gomme for his Blogger Love On Wednesdays podcast.

Pete is an incredibly personable guy, and I have a feeling he'd be great to set with over a couple of beers.  Not that lightweight Utah stuff, where they water the beer down to like 4 percent.  I'm talking good, New England Lager beers.  

That said, I'm also fairly sure that I talked too much, talked too fast, and meandered down Tangent Lane a few too many times.  I mentioned to him (off recording) that I have been living happily in my little bubble of relative anonymity, and I'm somewhat ambivalent about venturing out into new territory. I've never received hate mail, nor have I had to deal with trolls and other lower life forms.  It's like the Garden of Eden -- all naively exuberant exploration without any real consequences.

It's probably to be expected, then, that I'm feeling a little anxious about letting that go and moving on into the Big Bad World.

But moving on I am.  I started with getting my ticket to BlogHer for this year... and now everyone except my Mom can tune in to Pete's B.L.O.W. podcast this Wednesday to hear me interviewed.   He's too nice to tell you that I'm as awkward to talk to on the phone as you would imagine, but I suspect he required a stiff drink and perhaps a high colonic in order to recover from exposure to all hundred kinds of my crazy.  Anyway, be sure to give it a listen so that you, too, can hear me cackle like a hyena and possibly talk about conceiving my children under the influence of too much wine. 

Thanks, Pete.  You're a gentleman and a scholar. :)

Tweet Tweet.

Oh dear. I mean, I can already tell you that a medium that allows me to vent, in 140 characters or less, exactly what is on my mind at any given moment of the day - and with insane ease, no less - is probably not a good idea.

That said, I'm doing it anyway. Because I can. Leastways, until I get sick of the noises coming from my own brain.

So you can now continue to follow the minutiae of my deranged mind over at Twitter.

Caution: May cause sudden onset of narcolepsy. Not surprisingly, the little thoughts I have over the course of the day make for less-than-riveting entertainment. You have been warned.

Standing Still

I have 2 different posts already half-written and now filed away for another day. (Including the meme you tagged me with, sistah S. I'll get there, I promise.)

But at the moment, I am strangely caught up in a feeling of inertia.

My life has been a strange and constant parade of stops and starts, fits and spurts. My growing years consisted of a string of moves every two years or so. There were always siblings going off to college, getting married, having babies.

When I was 9 my dad helped put a bad man in jail, and maybe had a contract put out on his life by some mafia types who weren't happy about it. Police staked out our house and followed us everywhere for days. I only vaguely realized something was happening, and mostly pouted about not being allowed to go ride my bike around the neighborhood for a while.

When I was 13 my Mom's only sister lost her battle with cancer. I remember my last conversation with her; I was baking cookies in our old kitchen in Utah. We talked about her hummingbirds, and whether there were more or less this year than usual. I went to her funeral a few months later; hers was the first dead body I had ever seen. We moved again a few months later.

California was my first settle-down experience. We stayed there for all 4 years I was in high school. Of course, adolescence is hardly a period of stillness. There was puberty to go through, driving to learn, proms to attend, boys to kiss. I got my first real kiss on my eighteenth birthday, which I will forever associate with the preceding loss of 80 pounds. I did a lot of running in those days. It helped to clear my head.

This year marks my tenth year in the DC area. I've moved constantly in that time - as a single girl apartment and house hopping and then as half of a married couple going from a single-bedroom to a tw0-bedroom to make room for baby number one. Finally, as a family we moved to our house here in our country town.

Three and a half years have passed since we came here. We had another baby. We lost a baby. Now we're having another baby. But the big things in our own life have a sense of inevitability to them - a feeling that we're following our plan. Through the struggles here and the joys here, there is a feeling of... resting. A sense that we are standing still. Waiting. As though this is the quiet, sheltered time before life goes haywire once again.

Perhaps it's just that, as a child, the bumps in the road that shaped us unaware begin to get lost in the landscape as we cross the bumps of adulthood. We evolve, and we cope with the present.

Every once in a while, though, there's a moment of absolute stillness. There are moments when the storm of life rages around you, and you glory in it. There come moments in the life of a parent where you must surrender briefly to the chaos, and suddenly find yourself at peace.

When I was 11, we lived in Texas. I stood outside on a chilly early-spring afternoon as a rainstorm threatened the skies above me. The wind blasted in all directions around me, lashing whips of hair across my rosy-cold cheeks. Each gust felt closer to whipping me right up off the ground and spinning me off into the sky. The air was thick with the coming rain and the clouds overhead were dark and menacing in the green-tinted sky. No cars drove the streets and no other soul crossed the horizon in the empty field where I stood. I closed my eyes and raised my arms against the blast, ready to dissolve against the rush of the wind.

Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick..sorta

Let's get the quick-quick out of the way first, shall we?

I am still sorta slacking. But not really. But I'll explain more after Thursday afternoon. No, I can't explain that statement further right now, but suffice it to say that after Thursday I will be back to blogging with regularity and I will explain everything then.

Ahem.

Second quickie? I am still sick. Yesterday I was feeling better. Today I am feeling worse. Also I think I might have blown my nose hard enough this morning to extrude a small piece of brain tissue. Chomp on THAT visual for a while. And then realize it was about 10 times more disgusting than you imagined it.

On to the slow. And the painful.

I am fairly ambivalent when it comes to football teams in general and the Patriots in particular... But, being married to a rabid Pats fan, I do my wifely duty and cheer them on. Last night we had a few friends over to watch the game and gorge on way too much good food (Hello Puerto Rican Meatballs, and where have you been all my life?).

And so it was that slowly, yet surely, my husband's soul was crushed last night. All his hopes and dreams, the incredible high of this past season, the anticipation of a "Nineteen games! Undefeated!".... these things were smashed to teeny-weeny-smithereeniez.

So, to get to the crux of my dilemma... I can't bring myself to really put more sincerity into it than a wistful "Oh, that's too bad, isn't it." How, then, dear internet, am I possibly supposed to cheer up poor T? What is the accepted protocol for this sort of thing. Is there a hallmark card for this scenario? Or do I just have to ride it out until the start of Soccer season? (When he can put all his hopes on his other team, the one I actually care enough to root for on my own, our beloved D.C. United). (Not that I actually watch all their games with him because.. hello!.. scripted television requires my attention, y'all.)

The only other competition that might be able to cheer him is the Super Tuesday race tomorrow. I usually don't get rabid about politics -- I try to be as measured as possible, keeping my mind open to new information, etc. But in this case, I'm actually getting hopeful, nay, excited at the possibility of the DNC actually getting my candidate on the ticket this year.

It all really came together for me after the South Carolina primary. It was the first time I had actually listened to a full speech by Barack Obama, and by the end of it I was nodding my head with enthusiasm and even occasionally pointing at the television and (okay, if I'm totally honest) also maybe I was yelling "Yes! Exactly!" like a bag lady talking to her cats.

But at that moment, I bought into it. Into the evangelizing, into the stirring words and the impassioned voice. At that moment I believed that my vote might actually count for something in this next election, that maybe this godawful war in Iraq won't really trail endlessly on into the next century, that maybe the economy doesn't have to stay in the crapper. Most importantly, I began to think it possible that the intolerance and the paranoia that have stripped away so many of the sacred civil liberties that should be protected in this country - the very things that give us something worth protecting and defending - could be restored.

In the frantic and rabid race to "go out and get our enemies and crush them where we find them" etc, etc, etc hawkishness of the recent-past, I have done some serious soul-searching. I honestly believe that if the US turns into a place where we justify the use of torture, where we spy on our own citizens without warrant or probable cause, where we detain people for months or years without the benefit of legal protection or counsel... if we continue further down the path that the current administration placed us on... well, in my mind, we become a country and a way of life no longer worth defending.

If you have to destroy it in order to defend it, you've already lost the battle.

And listening to Barack Obama, rereading some of his previous speeches and looking at the people who would be working with him and around him were he to become the next president...

I can't help but begin to hope that all the things I love most about this country - about the way of life we profess to protect, the ideals we hold as our foundation - might be restored and even magnified, after all.

Obama '08.

*Stepping carefully down from soapbox, because I am clumsy and fall down quite easily*

Okay, I promise, no more hot-buttons for a while. Just hot tea and a warm couch. SNIFFLE.

I like big "But"s

But! I neglected to mention? I have been writing.

It's just an outline right now, really, and likely it's crap... Something about Suicides and what happens to the people left behind to pick up the pieces. And? It's sort of a comedy. I know, screams hilarity, right?!

But I'm writing. And someday I might actually submit a manuscript somewhere.

Shortly to be followed, of course, by my first official rejection letter from a publisher.

So much to look forward to....