Perfect Time To Have Kids, No?

I'm considering a return to talk therapy, and holy christ, I was unprepared for how awkward that sentence would sound out loud: the verbal equivalent of that couple who walks around with their hands in each other's rear pants pockets, regardless of how impractical that may be when they're also, oh I don't know, trying to cross the street while making out and talking on a cell phone.

I know I stood up Dr. Crazy Socks last time, but I'm pretty sure he (meaning his wallet) will welcome me back into the crazy-fold with lots of, "So how have you been"s and "How did that make you feel"s.

I've been feeling really good, actually, considering the stress I've been under (and yes, I realize it's mostly self-induced stress, fuck you very much), but I'm still just a little big ::off:: somehow. Anxiety is slowly creeping into my brain, and as Gray pointed out last night, winter is approaching, and we all know how the onslaught of 6 dark months tend to = me in a corner with a spoon pressed perilously close to my eyeball, humming Edelweiss and stroking my stuffed lobster toy.

Also, I'm trying to figure out why I feel the need to be incessantly, exhaustively over-scheduled. I tell myself I LIKE DOWN TIME and I'm pretty sure I mean that when I say it, except when I look at my calendar for the next two months, I feel like I'm trying to emulate Barack Obama, granted with fewer black tie events and more dog poop, but I'm fucking booked solid, is what I'm trying to say, and all of these things I have going on are voluntary (besides my full-time, necessary for continued survival-type job and my part-time, why dear god am still doing this to myself college classes), and I can't figure out why I seem unable to just sit the fuck down already.

After work today, I'll be driving to the St. Paul campus (for the second time this week, and regardless that all my fall classes are online) to pick up and distribute the September issue of The Metropolitan newspaper. Then I'll hustle home to go for a walk with my dog and shovel down some dinner before biking over to my doggy client's house to take her for a walk. Then it's home to read Don Quixote for my Lit class for as long as I can keep my eyes open.

I don't even have time to drink during the week anymore. If that's not a cry for help, I don't know what is.

I'm supposed to meet my mortgage broker one of these nights to sign some documents in preparation for closing on our house on September 30th, which means I also need to start packing because HOLY SHIT WE ARE MOVING AGAIN IN ONE MONTH, but I should start packing until I've finished writing our thank you cards from the wedding, and I can't forget the writing deadlines, and then Kylie arrives to crash with us (meaning I'll want to do nothing but to paint her toenails and talk her ears right out of the room. Over several glasses cases of wine.) Regardless of this ridiculous time schedule, I find myself scanning the domestic "gigs" listed on Craigslist, searching for part-time cleaning jobs to make a little extra money because I have fifteen spare minutes every other Tuesday evening and I'll be damned if I spend that time enjoying myself. Plus, two people have told me I'm "crazy" since yesterday. Maybe I should look into that.

I think this post was a way of convincing myself I need therapy. I just don't have time to make an appointment.

School's Out

I've been doing a lot of reading in the last two weeks, which in turn has let to my doing a lot of Couch Cocktail Sipping, only augmented by the fact that it's been coldish and raining for a couple of weeks, so the fireplace is oh so very delightful, and what else would one do by the fire besides drink and read? Nothing, that's what I thought. In the process of vegging out so hard that my brains have melted entirely and drained out of my rectum and onto the furniture, my Muse has filed for divorce citing, "Smells Like Brain Farts".

I have five books going at the moment, all of them piled haphazardly around my house and car along with ten other books I haven't begun but must return to the library in a week, bobby pins and crossword puzzled shoved in as place holders, all of them are equally wonderful in their own special ways, but mostly they're wonderful because I don't HAVE to read any of them. Which is not to say that I did not enjoy basically everything I did have to read this semester, it's just that the berries which ripen on the Pleasure Tree are ever so much juicer than their Required Tree counterparts, if only because nobody is telling me to pick and eat them.

Well, that, and that I don't have to analyze their juiciness until my head explodes.

I had my first true English major experience yesterday. I was reading an achingly beautiful memoir by Joan Didion (only because I happened to pick up that book on my way out the door, else I might have been devouring a juvenile book about wilderness survival or the end of civilization and a teenager's decision to repopulate the planet) when someone commented, "Joan Didion. That's kind of...high brow, isn't it?" As I was completely unprepared for this question about the level of brow-iness of Didion's book, my only possible response was, "Yeah, well. I'm an English major," as if somehow the fact that I am majoring in English would explain the writer's pomposity. My next inclination was to confess that I also read Penthouse, but somehow (after all, this was my gynecologist I was speaking with) I was able to keep that tidbit to myself.

My dad asked me not long ago what I was reading, and I ran down a laundry list of titles and authors, none of whom he seemed to recognize, then he inquired about whether I'd read any Vince Flynn lately. The answer to that, as it has always been, was "no". I told him I'd picked of Middlemarch because I have chosen to use two different quotes by George Eliot in my wedding ceremony, and I figured I owed it to the author to see what other brilliance he'd written. Of course, I explain to my dad, this was before I realized that he was actually a Victorian she, writing under a male name because that was the loophole women found when they wanted to be taken seriously in that time. I am glad that I am alive now, in a time when I'm just as unlikely to be taken seriously whether man or woman, especially since I have small tits.

I am, as I said, devouring literature like I devour BLT's or Skittles or K-Y strawberry lubricant. At first, I found it unfortunate that the trade off for such bliss seemed to be that I could no longer write. And I don't just mean that I couldn't write anything decent, I mean that I literally was afraid to open my Blogger dashboard because of the sound of violence of the Nothing that would happen. My fingers seem to quiver in fear. My brain remains filled with ideas and words and dreamy images and IDEAS but I am physically incapable of translating them from the existential mush they are into actual keys and letters and words, etc.

I've also begun listening on tape to Anne Lamott's instructional Bird by Bird multiple times in a row, and now I'm piling inspiration and drive on top of my ideas and characters and words, so that the whole lot of them are squishing my attention span into the floorboards of my car, and still I'm unable to do anything about it. For now. It's like everything is organizing itself into piles in my brain - the Funny pile and the Heavy pile and the Characters with Small Penises pile - and once they've been sorted and the floor has been swept, then the tiny OCD Muse who lives in my brain will appear with a tiny desk and a rusty typewriter and then she will begin to work again.

Perhaps it's my spirit's version of spring cleaning. Perhaps it's just the same old fucking procrastination I perfected in high school. It's definitely not the first time this has happened, and it certainly won't be the last. What it feel like this time, though, isn't so much like a well running dry as a runner stretching, lining up in a row across the track, preparing to take her mark.

She is preparing to Go.

This Is The Sound Of My Brain Exploding And Landing On That Guy Who's Just Minding His Own Damn Business. Wrong Place, Buddy. Can I Borrow That Book?

Some of my classmates and I were discussing how fucking dorky we are because, unlike MOST students, we're looking forward to the end of our semester in just a few weeks not so we can take a month off and relax, but for the opportunity to read even more than we already do. So we can read books for, like, fun. And stuff.

I know, it's crazy.

I've got a giant stack of books in the basement calling my name, but I just haven't been able to get to them. Some of them are fluffy crap, some of them are classics I've never read, there are at least 4 different Joyce Carol Oates novels, and (of course) there are the King novels I haven't re-read in over a year.

I keep requesting books from the library (like In The Woods and The Magician's Elephant) that have to be transported from one location to another and scanned along the way and marked with my name and put on a special shelf...so that I can cancel my request when I realize I do not have the time to read them until December. What with all the Say Yes to the Dress and 48 Hours Special Investigation episodes. What the hell is wrong with me? PUT DOWN THE PORNOGRAPHY AND READ A DAMN BOOK.

Ahem.

Anyway, so I started reading Lady Chatterley's Lover and I had to put it down. The only book I've sort of stuck with is the 100 Ghastly Ghost Stories that I read aloud to Gray after dinner by the firelight or out by the bonfire after dark. Because I don't torture him enough with requests to please "look for bugs in the sheets" and "rub my back, boy!" I have to forcibly molest his eardrums at night. It is important to our relationship that I do what I want 100% of the time.

So I'm not sure exactly what I was going to tell you now, I'm all distracted wondering if that one chick ended up buying that one dress that was $4,150 over her budget because I missed the end of the episode because the other show about the guy who murdered his wife and framed the pet rabbit was starting and my DVR was already taping The Little Couple.

Oh, that's right - so Christmas break. I've opted to take 6 days of PTO which mean that starting Christmas Eve, I will be on "vacation" from both school and work until January 4th.

In case you suck at math like me, I used my calculator and discovered that is ELEVEN ENTIRE DAYS of not working or schooling. In a row. To be used for reading and opting not to shower and possibly catching up on my obese Google reader.

And if that isn't a Merry fucking Christmas, kids....well then I don't know what is.

And until then, all I have to do is:

• create, edit and present a 15 minute video about the importance of the madrigal to the validation of the English vernacular for use in music and literature
• finish reading King Lear, The Tempest, and a bunch of stuff by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and John Gay
• finish a research paper comparing Shakespeare's treatment of female chastity to Chaucer's treatment of female sexuality through the Wife of Bath, and (OF COURSE) the implications of all that shit
• write a paper on one of 14 topics, all of which sound as daunting as this example: "The Infernal Ontologies of Marlowe & Milton - hellish states of beingness - compare the speeches of Mephistopheles and Satan in order to determine whether their respective authors are up to the same project and why does it matter?"
• take a final on Shakespeare's histories and tragedies
• polish off that bottle of Tanqueray
• quit smoking
• try not to cry a whole bunch

So what I'm saying is...what the fuck does "ontologies" mean?

As Opposed to a Wrestler

I'm pretty sure that the toilet paper in the bathrooms on my school's campus is made out of shards of glass. I kid you not, that shit is like sandpaper, and I'm reasonably certain that my labia is half an inch shorter now than it was in July.

My Brit Lit class is studying book I of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene at the moment, and there's this chick named Una who rides behind the knight named Red Crosse on a "lowly ass". She's got this lamb on a leash and she's kind of dragging it along with her (apparently NOT for dinner, which was my guess), and the whole ridiculous band of travelling beatitudes is rounded out with a dwarf who walks behind Una's ass. Her donkey, not her ass. But I guess also her ass if he's behind her, since we're getting technical here.

So there are all these one-to-one parallels between Una and Christ: she's riding a donkey, Christ rode a donkey. She's leading a lamb, Christ is a "shepherd of men". Her name (more or less) implies "truth" or "singularity". Christ was "the way, the truth, and the light," or something like that. Forgive my botched Biblical references, I've spent the last 10 years trying to scrub that shit out of my brain folds.

But then there's this dwarf.

What the fuck is the dwarf doing there? If the lamb wasn't dinner, I hope to god that poor misshapen dude wasn't scheduled for braising, although that might have made the story a little more appetizing...(see what I did there? appetizing? god I'm good) Was he busting into Mini-Me sketches every 20 miles to keep up morale? Was Redcrosse into some kinky shit when the sun went down?

That poor, shrunken man seems to be some kind of hand servant to Una, and scholars conjecture perhaps he represents Una's bodily needs - the pooping, the eating, the sleeping - all of those things that aren't spiritual, but are necessary when one is trapped inside a human body. I'm not sure who decided that the dwarf represents the shittiest things about humanity, but whatever. This was the 16th century and nobody ever accused those pigs of being politically correct.

Spenser describes the dwarf as lazy because he's always pulling up the rear, and I'm thinking to myself, "Ok, so Redcrosse is on a horse, Una's on a donkey, and the dwarf is using his tiny little stumps of legs, endlessly running to keep up with them. He's hustling as fast as he can go, all over the fucking kingdom, chasing this crackpot knight who appears to be accomplishing nothing other than LOOKING FOR TROUBLE, nobody listens to his advice, nobody asks his opinion, for for the love of god why can't he just ride the damned sheep already?!

And he's the lazy one. Um, sure that makes perfect medieval sense.

Anyhow, the class was debating the dwarf's possible symbolic meaning when one guy piped up and said, "Sometimes a dwarf is just a dwarf."

I'm pretty sure I heard the angels in heaven at that moment because truer words have never been spoken, and now I have a new personal mission statement because DAMMIT! Sometimes a dwarf IS JUST A FUCKING DWARF.

Did They Run From Their Own Mortality or Was It the Skidmark?

So with the publishing of my last post, I've unwittingly shoved two of my legion right over the edge of the Interweb into the dreaded vortex known as Pushing The Unfollow Button, an action which I'm told leads to herpes and cankles, so TAKE THAT you two. Once I've alienated the rest of you, my work here will be complete.

I wanted to remind all of you brave (morally corrupt) remaining (people who skip over me in their Reader) souls (pretend you're not dead inside) that you still have one day to enter my giveaway. And it's not even a used vibrator I'm giving away this time. It's an autographed, first edition copy of my aunt's book Rosie Red Bottom.

So, yeah. I started classes again last week, and I've been trying to think of the best way to describe my thoughts about this new semester so far, which is kind of hard because how do you begin to convey the effect that Sonnet 19 has upon your understanding of the definition of human sexuality?

Or your interpretation of the oral traditions of the pre-literate, pagan Germanic raiding tribes in which women were passed around like some kind of peace pipe?

Or your astonishment to learn that there are only four Anglo-Saxon manuscripts upon which we've base our entire English literary tradition for the last 1,000 years and how one of them almost burned in a fire in the 18th century and therefore would have been lost forever?

YOU DON'T begin to explain those things, mostly because nobody gives a fuck, you giant nerd. So let me put it to you this way:

My Shakespeare professor said "gay porn" on our first night of class*. THAT'S how awesome my classes are this semester.**

*What he actually said was "Cape Horn", but it took me about 20 beats to realize he wasn't comparing 16th century Atlantic seafarer's contributions to the emerging literary climate during the Renaissance...to Chicks with Dicks. Seriously, say it aloud to yourself. You'll understand my confusion.

**In other words, it's the first time I've ever truly been excited about what I am learning. It's THAT good.

Tastes Like Teen Spirit

You'll have to forgive me, I kind of forgot all about you people. I'd like to say that was due to some magnificently romantic tryst involving Beyonce and Gene Simmons, or some hopelessly dangerous adventure wherein my bodice was both ripped and was sewn up again by that nice lady in The Never Ending Story, or at the very least some interesting turn of personal events like, say, winning the lottery or buying a car or getting syphilis from a new tattoo...

...but in the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that (aside from the lingering gastro-intestinal distress and upper respiratory infection)((yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to be "scoped" out))(((in my nether regions))) the reason I haven't been posting is because now I'm a junkie and I can't be bothered with anything except where my next fix is going to come from and how much I can get for my used vibrator at the pawn shop if I wash it off real good first, because I need the money man. I need it bad.

Which, big surprise that I went over to the dark side, right? That's like saying the reason Star Jones is thin is because she finally went on a diet, did two reps of crunches a day, and quit eating lard by the spoonful. We all know she had surgery, and we all know I was bound to shoot up one day and decide I like it. And that's exactly what happened.

I'm completely hooked on Twilight.

It's really embarrassing for me because, in theory, I should hate these stupid teenage excuses for horror. Or romance. Or Whoremance. I swore up and down I'd never read them. My main man, SK, publicly knocked the Twilight author and said she "can't write worth a damn", which I have disagree and say that she can't write horror worth a damn, but as far as kickin' it Emo Style, she's off da hook.

The dialogue is editorialized at best, hooked on phonics at worst. The character of Bella is so fucking Emo Obnoxious that I want to punch her in the face. Seriously? Enough with the "I'm Not Good Enough For Edward" bullshit, you're making us all very nauseous, and quit being suck a fucking moron already.

But the STORY. Oh fuck me, the STORY. I CAN'T STOP READING IT. It took me a few weeks to read the first Twilight book because I was bound and determined to hate it. Then I read New Moon in about 36 hours. Then Gray brought home Eclipse last night after work, I picked it up at about 8:00, and by 11:00 I was 200 pages in and had to physically detach the book from my hand and forcibly restrain myself from going after it again.

It's VERY easy to read, thanks to the ultra-simplistic writing style which, presumably is due to the intended audience of "People Who Can't Read About Pre-marital Sex or Actual Gore", but that just makes it easier to fly through the chapters like a hot knife through butter.

It's a gigantic, big, huge guilty pleasure, and I think part of the appeal is that to me, someone who's wet dream involves getting paid to write, Stephanie Meyer has the ultimate Cinderella Story: Girl gets an idea in a dream, Girl writes book based on that dream, Girl's book gets published and then other girls masturbate to her dream, Girl gets paid to write three more books based on that dream. I really have to start sleeping more often.

What more could you ask for? Not having to struggle for years to get your story published? Not having to come up with an idea on your own and workshop the fuck out of it for 20 years?

Heaven, I say.