ribbit...i know they don't make that sound but i've never titled anything, ribbit, and i like it

heehee. i love the expression on that toad's face; i can totally sympathize. my kid has been a bit, um, high spirited today and i think my expression may have resembled that more than once throughout the course of today :)

27, 10 and 5

(i've never seen pink honeysuckle; leave it to my grandma to have some growing in her yard)

i had a wonderful evening, despite the circumstances. i played at the kids table all night and enjoyed myself thoroughly. i did get a nice, new, deep bruise from my lovely sister--but it was well worth with the fun we had :)

wine...it's what i'm drinking (hence the lame title)

so, as promised, here it is-- the drunken brawl story.

my sister and i get along great, most of the time. like any two people we have our differences but, all-in-all, we see eye to eye on most everything. we're only two and a half years apart and i'm only an inch or two taller and only a pound or ten heavier than her--but she is the
rougher and tougher sister by far. we are very different in our personal lives; overall, she's the athlete and i'm the artist. we're both solid and neither of us gets hurt easily--and even if we're bleeding profusely from a down to the bone scrape, we're still laughing hysterically. oh, i did cry when she broke both of the bones in my shin when i was 12 , other than that, we find pain quite humorous.

so, here and there, we drink together; and, here and there, we get into one big physical fight. like i said, we see eye to eye but have our differences and i think, that instead of letting those differences split us apart on a daily basis, we simply get drunk once in awhile and throw down. it's quite therapeutic in fact. usually, by the time we're done, we're both laughing so hard about our injuries that we can hardly stand.

so, last saturday this happened again. this time, we had a huge yard, relatively soft grass and an audience when we attacked eachother. we actually made one guy say...wow, that had to hurt--and we all-out shocked another dude with our ability to withstand each other's blows...and still jump right back up. we had to quit when my sister hyperventilated from a laugh attack and i had lost both earrings and my favorite bracelet...which i still can't find btw...

but so yeah, my arm finally moves in all directions again and i think she can touch her eye without it causing her to wince in pain and best of all, her and i are as good and as strong as ever...

tonight, i have no title...

i thought i was done with all that depth-y stuff. tonight, i was planning to post a post like this: so, i was recently turned on to mcdonald's iced coffee and... or one like this: so, my sister and i got into another drunken brawl and... or even one like this: top ten reasons why i despise june bugs. 1...

but, you see, my grandpa died.

now we have never been particularly close. i have mostly fond memories of him from when i was little and good ones from when i was older but, like i said, we were never too close. it feels like a great uncle or someone dying. i mean, you feel sad but, for the most part, it doesn't hit too close to home. this is similar to that for me except the people most effected by this are some of the ones i hold closest to me and i just can't stop thinking about how they must feel--and in doing so, i'm once again faced with the reality that death is imminent and the one and only thing i will never be successful at talking my way out of.

i think that when i think of my mom, her sister's and my grandma, it hurts the biggest...my mom has brother's too, but being a female, with my own dad, i empathize with them the strongest.

my grandparents have been divorced all of my life, so my grandma is used to living on her own--but he was still the father of her kids; they dated, and married, and made a home, and produced a family together. now my grandma stands alone in front of her army, her second in command gone forever. i keep wondering how that might feel. i am in my years where she was with him and these are wonderful years for me. i will look back at them some day and i will miss them either way...but to have the person i shared them intimately with, dead...i would feel so alone, i think. good times or bad times, they were times of my life. maybe she's looking at death now and maybe it feels more real than ever.

and then there's my own mom. she had been so dutiful to my grandpa for years now. they were not always close and he wasn't always grateful for her, but she never left his side despite the toll it has taken on her personally. she went from a few years ago moving him from home to home, spending hours making him individually packaged, home-cooked meals he could freeze for later and doing all of his errand running to sitting with him for hours and reading him the newspaper, staying for even more hours, at his side and feeding him when he was too weak to do it himself--and those examples are just the tip of the iceberg of what she has done. she gave up her job, her social time and her life in general to be there for him. she rolls her eyes with her voice when i've mentioned this, but i see her as a saint. i really do. i keep thinking of how she must be feeling. she has cried about this, been stressed at times and felt so alone with it all. we're not always the closest to each other, as of late, but i still think about her a daily basis. i try to imagine what she must think, how she might feel...maybe there's a sense of relief, hell, there would have to be i think, but there must be a general feeling of, "now what?" too. and then the loneliness of losing a parent, someone who raised you, someone you have built the last few years of your life around...my dad said that after losing both of his parents he felt quite orphaned in the world, even as an adult. so i think of all of that too. i think of losing my own dad...and that's when i cry. it's so self-centered that that's what makes me cry the hardest, but it's the only way i know how to empathize. i think about being a grandma, losing my friends one by one, and i cry; i think about my daughter caring for me someday and i cry as well, but i think, i think of my mom the most. i am so proud of her strength and i pray it's in me too...i look up at her as i did before we ever saw eye to eye. i think that strength must be in me considering that i am her daughter; but, at this point, i can only hope due to, like i said, only being able to think about things; assuming i could be half of her is selfishly presumptuous. i don't know what she's going through; i can only imagine.

then there's her sister's. one of them is on a train right now. she was coming here to help my mom care for him because my mom was just so tired. she had expected to see him for one last father's day and now, on her travels, she knows that she is too late. i wonder if she questions if she would have left earlier had things been different or if, with her faith, if she's secure in knowing that was simply his time. her other sister is so far away and so lonely. i'm not sure she will come here due to fears she has, but then i think about her alone. there is loneliness in death and there is loneliness in life and she is facing them both, alone. and then all of them are dealing with a media barrage of father's day reminders for, 'getting dad the perfect gift'...maybe it feels like salt in a wound, maybe not.

i feel so useless in my thoughts. thoughts don't help anyone, but i know i can't make things better either. so i write, and i toss around thoughts of death, and of life, and i find some sort of solace in that i suppose. i toss the thoughts around sober, and i toss them around stoned, and occasionally i toss them around while drunk. i'm always trying to figure it all out...as if an altered state of mind might be the key to unlocking it all (it's not)...i've been trying to figure it all out since i was five. i try to just be thankful for my age, my health, my situation in this life and those things help me feel better. not in an, 'i'm better than you sort of way' but in an, 'i need to not forget to be thankful' sort of way.


10:40 pm...(i'm finally back to my computer after a night on the phone and two glasses of wine.)

i'm very sorry if i've offended anyone tonight...family mostly...but i'm just hitting 'publish post' before scrutinizing my post like normal. i'm just not in the mood. sometimes you get me raw and a bit unedited...before the 'oooh, that sounds bad' thoughts kick in and i start deleting and heavily editing. despite what anyone may believe, i have never talked 'flowery, sugar-coated bullshit'...and if i have, it's what i truly believe. i'm quite hippy-ish and that whole buddhist non-attachment/forgiveness/non-judgment thing speaks loudly to me. if you think about what i believe i do make sense and i'm not crazy. maybe tomorrow i will write of the drunken brawl with my sister...it was a doozy this time... for now though, i am going to finish this glass of wine and then pour another. i am going to wander off to bed, i think i'll shower in the morning, and i'm going to turn on a movie--something funny most likely...and i'm going to use that movie to clear my mind from the past/present/future cluster-f*ck of a mess it's stuck in and then i'm going to sleep.

a little sexism, plus a little anarchism makes for a little of today's blog

(sadly, i've never been a fan of the mini donut)

yesterday's blog led me to this fascinating continuation into today's blog...tv women/moms.

them damn tv women are portrayed as do-it-all goddesses whom rise flawlessly to every challenge on a career level, relationship level and family level. it sucks. it sucks in the same way i'm supposed to by 5'8, 112 pounds, brazillian-ly tan and a 34 D according to our lovely culture. see, i'm neither of those women...not even close. i know i'll never be the model, despite diets, self tanners and push up bras--but there's still hope of being that model employee/girlfriend/mother. so, on days when i can't quite successfully channel my inner mrs. cleaver and seamlessly merge her with my inner ms. moore, i feel like a total failure. oh, i should add mrs. ingalls to that one too after purchasing a half acre of land. (i really wish i could update the characters i'm using; apparently, i haven't watched tv since 1982.)

it's such a juggling thing and to be honest, i have never so much as been able to juggle two balls. serious. i'm not good at it. i'll play catch for hours with one but any more, well, i drop them and say screw it and then i focus on that one again. it's just me. i truly believe that's beneficial in parts of my life, like with my pics. i'll spend an hour editing one if need be. i don't mind even a little. it feels like time well spent when all is said and done. throw in distractions and i get annoyed fast. not because i can't handle it, because i don't want to. how can you get good at something when you're split in more than one direction? i'm like that with my yard and my house too. i want to just work on it and then stand back and feel accomplished to see it all weeded and all clean...man that feels good. same with work, when i'm there, that's all i want to do. hell, i won't even make two trips in from target unless absolutely 100% necessary. i will cut off circulation in my arms lining four bags down each and i know one will break but if i can just focus on that and then be done...i'm happy. having a kid was a big, and slightly painful, adjustment due to this, trust me. i was shocked when i realized how impossible it became to focus on one of anything.

oh yeah, back to what i was originally getting at...the expectation of what women need to be seems to derive so heavily from pop culture and well, everything pop culture dictates should be reality, right? why do we fall into it so easily and then look down at the ones who don't--like they should be more to be better? i know our culture, in general, dictates that 'more, more, more' mentality--but why does breaking out of it equal judgment, and perhaps stoning from your peers? i guess our culture isn't too friendly to outsider's--which i find ironic considering we were built up as the melting pot of the world.

i'm not sure where all this stemmed from. i think it was high gas prices that started it all, oh, high gas prices and a slow day at work. i know things will only change when our priorities shift and not from internet bitching. the rise in materialism seemed to coincide, in the states at least, with the rise in leisure time. when people worked on the farm all the live long day finding the time to pick up a glamour magazine or turn on entertainment tonight would have been a waste. however, here come the dishwashers, washing machines, vaccuum cleaners and cars and the next thing ya know, marilyn monroe is what every woman strives to be. maybe all this frantic swimming to make ends meet will squash all that pop-culture derived hysteria we've all succumbed to at one point in time, or maybe i just sound sexist. don't know. don't care.

sometimes i think my kid might be better off growing up in a economically slow era so she has some depth--as opposed to growing up in the bubble-gum-colored america, held together with scotch tape (that's made in china, btw) we're all currently slothing around in.

i meant to post this yesterday but i fell asleep...oops

(rainy rush hour...the commute was almost an hour and a half)

so, i'm starting to think it would be cheaper to not work. with gas being what it is i'm really afraid i may not be able to stay working where i'm working. i love my job and my co-workers and the company but the 60 mile or so round trip with the four dollar plus per gallon gas--plus, paying for city parking...yeah, it's hard.

i spent my day researching the bus routes but, i'm afraid that, as of right now, that's not looking too feasible. the trip from my home, on a bus, is one and a half hours each way and the shortest i can get my trip down to is 47 minutes--and that's when i already drive over half the distance. unfortunately, they won't drop my kid off at the babysitter's house either.

when i was hired at the museum i work at, i commuted a whole 15 minutes. i knew we were moving but where we initially bought our home it would have only tacked on five to ten more minutes to the morning route. no big deal. then when we found the home we're in now..well, my commute went to hell in a hand basket. where did that saying come from anyway? what a strange thing to say...maybe it had to do with the wizard of oz and toto's really the devil who made the tornado come and destroy dorothy's farm and then pink floyd played their devil's music that coincidently coincided with the movie proving that toto really was the devil. yeah, that was one of my weaker ideas. there's pretty much holes in that theory bigger than in that movie with shia laboof. that was a pretty good movie btw. i have to say that most people at work seem to be bussers and walkers but i'm not...my actual life life isn't too conducive to that. i live way out there and i have a kid whom needs a place to stay in the mornings due to the schedule overlap.

i keep thinking that if i just hang in there, when she starts kindergarten it might get easier but i'm not sure why. i know i'll get a raise soon but realistically, i know it won't be anything over the .50 cents to a dollar an hour that seems fairly standard...and won't help much in the long run.

it seems selfish to stay here but even more lonesome to think about leaving...especially while my kid still loves it so much here--and at the zoo where i get a free membership and the science museum where i get one too. this job is flexible with our insane schedule; they're beyond understanding that i'm a mom first, employee second and the perks, like i mentioned, are wonderful--but what about the cost?

i think about a second job, but doing what? there's not a whole lot out there that needs help the one day a week for the eight hours i have...for some ridiculous reason i enjoy my family and even like being at home and committing to more time away from them sounds more painful than leaving the museum. besides, if i wasn't at home nothing would get done there. my guy is so busy and doesn't have time or energy to do laundry, make meals, clean toilets etc...i love to be able to do those things but if i'm holding down two jobs, when will those things get done? i'm behind now and to find socks this morning through my clean, unfolded mountain of laundry took almost five minutes; i refuse to get used to that as the norm.

so, with as busy as things are...why do i still end up feeling like such a slacker? i guess when your priorities are equally distributed between that of a 1950's housewife and a modern day working woman throwing my hat in the air while sonny curtis croons in the background, 'you're gonna make it after all', it's easy to feel like you should be doing more. like your 'good enough' is never enough these days when gas is sky-rocketing, food costs are up and everything else is following...all your efforts only lead to the need to do more.

so, i'm contemplating not staying at the most beneficial job to myself and my family in order to make more money to keep from drowning...i guess both are beneficial to my family and i in their own regard--when put like that, that is. i guess it's a sign of the times...then again, in 1929, i'm quite certain there were plenty of parents asking themselves the same thing. maybe my life long, strange and somewhat morbid obsession with the great depression will be the key to figuring this out...who knows. i do know that that second kid isn't coming anytime too soon.

holy crap that got freakin long. i wrote it all while at work actually. we're doing this upgrade and i can't use the stuff i need on my computer so i'm just sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.
it's been a long day. i think i'll write tomorrow's blog too.

i love these flowers...