What a lovely rug! What's the fabric? Thank you, it's Golden Retriever.

I'd go get ice cream and watch Spongebob, but my executive functioning skills are diming and it's hard to actually plan and sequence what I need to do to get there. Besides, the kids left with their papa to go to piano lessons and I'd have no one to blame for turning on Spongebob but myself.

Okay. Pull ....self...together... mUST!

My dog is shedding large clumps of soft fur which carpet our house like a ubiquitous velour throw rug. I find clumps of it in corners, under beds, in our food, and weaved among the carpet fibers. It disgusts me. Even though when it's on his body I love to bury my head in his neck and smell the earth stuck in his fur. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my dog. Well. I do. It's insane how much I love my dog. I decided to pull out the big guns and defurminate the pooch. Special shampoos and a cleansing rinse (scientifically designed to loosen the hair follicle), a knubby bath scruber, a sham, the works. I even got a specialized de-furminator brush. I spend the whole evening on this task. At one point in my frenzy I launched a glob of defurminator into my left eyeball which means, I suppose, that I can cross growing hair on my eyeball off of my list of things to worry about. As for Toby... well, he IS clean. But as far as the fur goes, I think stopping this process, or encouraging it to follow my agenda is like asking my children to pee straight into the toilet without the oversplash onto the seat, walls, floor, mirror, window, hallway, adjoining bedroom, etc (depending on how long they've been holding it before making the frantic sprint to the toilet and their dance of contorted gyrations while pulling out their little pee sticks). Fur. Pee. It's all part of my life now.

I can tell the Zyrtec I took a while back is starting to kick in. My throat feels less tense and constricted. I think I heard a sigh deep down in my sinuses as something or someone just opened a canal. God how I hate and love drugs. I'd feel better if I was sucking on a mushroom, or licking an herb, or smearing insect guts on my nose....but I am too far removed from naturalistic medicine to even know what that would look like.

I think I may even go put laundry away and start dinner. After that, I'll scoop up a clump of dog hair and wipe off the toilet seat.

hold me mommy!

I have a limited amount of physical and mental energy this week. My head is truly gone. My body is only half here. Ask Ron how many times I lost my car and office keys at lunch today, only everytime I tried to find them. Clarity, attention and energy are fluxing. My head is messed up probably because I tried unsuccessfully to wean myself off of Zoloft. Perhaps I don't need it, perhaps I do. Perhaps the darkness I'm experiencing is drug withdrawal, perhaps it is disease now untreated. But at the moment I feel only half alive in all respects and that is a worrisome condition. My body is also reacting to a bug. A microscopic enemy. A not so gentle reminder that we Goliaths are a quivering gelatinous mass when faced with this David

I'll admit. I'm a little scared. I keep having fantasies of dying here on the couch. What will they say at my funeral? Do you remember as a kid, having fantasies about this or was that just me?

Okay. Focus. I think I am being hysterical. I think I'm going to go get some ice cream and watch Spongebob with the kids.

arrgggghhhh!

When I read stuff like this (see below), it makes me want to tear my fucking eyeballs out of my head. Don't ask how I landed on this, seeking for answers to a quandary caused by a combination of events of late in my extended family & social circles and an argument I had with hubby last night which led us nowhere as these arguments always do. Nowhere except for the land of sour milk and desiccated honey.

http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dll/Magazines/Ensign/1997.htm/ensign%20january%201997.htm/becoming%20whole%20again.htm

Anyone out there care to share in my outrage or are you smarter than me?

more bullshitin'

I've decided that approximately 28% of everything I say is probably pure bullshit. Maybe even 36%. Let's say between 28-36% of everything I say is bullshit. This goes for blogging too. Truth as I'm beginning to see it is that I do care about what I post out there and I do care about who might read it. Maybe I didn't initially in my early spontaneous expressions stage, but I've grown into this and I'm only now realizing it. It's probably behind my scarity of posts over the past year. I think it has to do with my actually developing relationships within my blogosphere and I no longer hide behind the relative comfort of anonymity. But I'd rather have the relationships than the freedom of stranger status. I think it helps me to take pause before I throw something out there, and in this pause I can question my thoughts and my motives and the sequencing of my ideas. I hope it will help me cut out the unnecessary, confabulatory, tangential verbosity that has been my m.o. What I hope will come of this, are thoughts that are a little more developed. I'll still have typos and sentence fragments I'm sure, but I believe they will be grammatical errors within a more delibrate thought train. Although I reserve the right to throw out half baked nonsense when the mood strikes me.

Half baked streams of consciousness like this...

I am developing a nasty case of pink eye. Odd because I've pulled out the "can't go, gotta cancel 'cause I have pink eye" excuse a few times and now I actually HAVE it! I don't think I've ever had pink eye until now. It's not fun. No wonder people happily allow me out of obligations.

or this...

Today I was working with a young man with high functioning autism. I seriously love this kid. He is funny and creative and full of energy and life. He told me today that he actually IS a superhero. "Oh yeah?" I asked, "what is your special power?" He replied that he is a superhero because he is "superheroish." Then he demonstrated his superheroness until I made him sit down and do some breathing exercises.

or this...

I find that when I pull out my laminator, kids who are demonstrating their superhero powers calm down really quick. 'Cause hey... who doesn't like to laminate?

Yeah. That's good fun. Meaningless and trivial information that no one really cares about but it feels so oddly satisfying to throw it out there anyway. Not well thought out...not even thought out at all. When you read it, I'm reading it for the first time too.

But then again I do have a post that I've been working on for the past week. It's all still in my head and I pull it out when I'm stuck at a traffic light. It has to do with the concepts of pleasure and restraint. But I need more traffic lights before I'm ready to talk about this yet.

Pink eye making it so I can't see the computer screen well, which is my signal to turn this off and get some shut eye. Let's hope I can open them in the morning with all the goopy adhesions that will develop as I'm sleeping tonight. The part of me that loves to peel my sunburn and pop my zits will love pulling the caked mucous out of my eye tomorrow. Admit it, I'm not alone in these fetishes am I?!

It's been so long since...

I've done any blogging that I forgot my password!

But today I was struck by the urge to blog. I’m not sure where this comes from, or where it goes when my blogging activity is silent but I try not to question these things too much. I blog just for me. It helps me process my thoughts, but the side effect is often a blatant self centeredness which makes it hard for me to ever read what I have written. Maybe I am like the two year old with a fist full of finger paint, the actual end product is only incidental to the fun of smearing the creamy, cool paint over a clean white canvas. I love the feel of the words as they take shape on the page as much as I loved the feel of the aromatic slime squishing between my fingers. The pictures I create in my posts are probably very comparable to the finger painted masterpieces I made in preschool. But I feel neither inhibited nor advantaged by personal skill level because from my perspective, none of this matters. I do not long for awards. I don’t consider myself a formal or polished “writer”. I have no aspirations of landing a regular column in the New Yorker. I don’t care if I end with a preposition. I don’t care if my page is littered with sentence fragments. I don’t even care if I have an audience. May I reiterate? I blog for me. It is an entirely selfish endeavor. But if this were true, why blog at all? Why not just keep a journal? Why open up the possibility for an audience? Because when I have a journal, I always destroy what I’ve written. I come to hate it that much. I have had journals before, pages and pages of them and with one spontaneous strike of the key, it is all gone. Before the computer, I’ve been known to burn part or all of a journal. I don’t yet understand why I do this. It’s a little like unexpectedly hearing a recording of my own voice, or accidentally walking in front of a mirror in a department store before recognizing my own reflection. Those first few moments before my brain can process its own shell exposes my naked and objective truth. Truth told by how I hold myself, my posture, facial features and expressions. Do I see a happy and confident woman, the woman I aspire to be? It’s a brief glimpse of me from a stranger’s eyes. I have to admit, my usual response is tinged with repulsion. When I later read what I’ve written, I get a similar reaction. What exactly is behind this is still outside of my full understanding. Maybe it’s my attempt to deny, erase or rewrite history. Maybe it’s the blatant self centeredness that I’m trying to destroy, both the tangible and intangible forms. Maybe it represents something inside of me that I do not accept. It's not usually the form that I abhore, but the message. However, when I blog, it nearly always stays put because in theory once it’s “out there” it becomes shared information. I let it stay because I feel obligated to allow it and maybe eventually to face it. It's the mere suggestion of "the other" in this whole process that changes the rules. I don't write for "the other" and in fact I try to ignore the other as much as possible (probably breaking some cardinal rules of Writing 101). But without you, whatever I write is as good as gone.