A Wad of Rambling

Why are lists SO much easier? Yay, lists!

1. The other day, while finishing up a little Mr. Goodbar, I bit down on an uncommonly large peanut. Odd, I thought. Further exploration yielded up that it was NOT, in fact, an uncommonly large peanut, but was instead a portion of my right upper wisdom tooth, which had decided to split the popsicle stand that was my mouth. Oh, lovely. My teeth are seventeen kinds of crooked, but they are in good shape. Until now. A consultation with my dentist ("Oh, your teeth are just beautiful! Except for that one that's crumbling as we speak...") led me to the oral surgeon, who suggested I get all of my wisdom teeth extracted while the crumbling one went, because they were all going to give me the same trouble eventually as it's hard to clean them properly. So Tuesday, I'm doing just that. I am NOT thrilled about the process at all, although my teeth are all in and with straight roots and the surgeon was pretty much like, "I could basically pull a middle school student off the playground to do this." Because there will be needles and knives and pulling things IN MY MOUTH and I will be PUT TO SLEEP and...oh, yeah. This all takes place two days before the Thanksgiving which I suggested the younger generation cook this year. I'm in charge of the turkey. And ham. And the pineapple casserole. THE CASSEROOOOOOOLE. Again, the doctor is fairly adamant that it will be easy peezy fresh and breezy, but I live in fear that I will take pain medication and be found in the kitchen at two o'clock in the morning, sculpting a turkey out of sweet potatoes and dog hair.
2. Because my laptop is still dead (turns out it's the thingy inside the computer that you plug the cord thingy into...AGAIN...basically, I could have bought a new laptop for what I've paid to fix the thingy), my NaNo novel is pretty much a bust. I just have a hard time writing fiction at my desk. However, I queried an agent about a nonfiction idea I had and...um...she wants a formal proposal. Well. Huh. In pretty much standard NotHannah fashion, I have shut down completely and am now dithering and not getting the proposal together at all. (Selma, I TOLD you I felt that post about finishing and writing and success. Sigh.)
3. I agreed to be room mother for Jeffrey's class. The idea of me being a room mother is laughable and makes me queasy at the same time. I mean, in theory, I'm all about some cupcakes and teacher appreciation folderol and stuff. In reality, I'm a mess who can't find her cupcake cups.
   
4. I gave in and listened to Christmas music. I blame Barefoot Mommy. All was well until I heard "Hard Candy Christmas." Y'all. This is a song about a whorehouse closing. NOT a Christmas tune.
5. I was tickled pink to hear the Gap give give a shout out to Pagans in its holiday ad. Suck on it, AFA.
6. Tomorrow, we go to the Kentucky game with the J-Man. In the rain. Without our precious Uga VII. Sniff.
7. I made homemade cocoa from a recipe online last night and it was quite possibly the worst thing anybody has ever made ever in the history of frothy, warm, sweet holiday drinks. It tasted like ass. Ugh. Shudder. Does anybody have a recipe that rocks? (And doesn't involve non-dairy creamer. We're trying to stay away from transfat and HFCS.)
8. We have mice in our kitchen. Well, a mouse. I saw it dart across the floor yesterday and just...ugh. Living in the country, I've lived with mice in the house all my life. It's not, for me, a huge deal. However, I HATE it when they crawl in my cupboards and leave their poo everywhere. Seriously, mice. If you're going to live here, use the frickin' toilet. I just now got all of my kitchen tools back in their respective drawers from the last mouse season and its poo offerings. (Yes. It took a year, almost. What do you want from me, people?) Because the chances of toilet training the little boogers seems slim, we're going to be hauling out the traps soon. Ugh squared. Jeffrey is not thrilled. "You know, Daddy, if you were a mouse, you'd want to live in our house, too. And you wouldn't eat just cheese." Thank you, Jack Hannah Jr.
9. Aaaannnd, the part of the Joker in the next Batman movie will be played by Kool-Aid McSquishyface. I think she has the deranged face down pat. And she shows an amazing range of emotion. The title will be Batman Dies From the Cuteness.

Four Months

Y'all. Before I get started, let me just say that I was in the process of crafting responses to your comments on the last post (thoughtful responses...amusing and hepcat responses) when I moved my hand wrong and all of them disappeared. The computer was thoughtful enough to beep at me, reproachfully, before they all went away. Bastard computer. So. Thanks for the comments (you know I hoard them like little jewels) and I'll try to respond after I get through scraping dried egg off the floor.

My laptop power adaptor is screwed up again, a situation which I greeted less with frustration and more with a sort of Eyeore-like acceptance of the inevitability of doom. I have decided to use it as an excuse for my low NaNo wordcount, which is a lie of epic proportions. To say I am spinning my wheels with the novel is not accurate. I'm pretty much sitting in the car, reading a magazine and picking my teeth. Blanche is not riding shotgun. I think she's pissed off about the loss of Hell-Mart inspiration.

Anyway, I use my laptop for work and now that I can't, I've reverted to using a pad of paper to write notes which I transcribe on the desktop. It's not efficient, nor is is particularly green, but what can you do? The other night, I grabbed a notebook and settled down in the easy chair to watch a Jack the Ripper documentary. (This is probably my fourth JtR doc. To sum up: he was a violent asshole who killed prostitutes. The end.)

On the third page of the notebook (after a list of bank expenses and a doodle that might be considered obscene if you look at it the right way), I came across an account of a series of mornings in early and mid July. I'm not sure why I did it; I guess I was hoping to have some info for our therapist at Emory. Reading over it is...crazy.

July 8: Breakfast--refused to come to table for fifteen minutes, took clip from sugar bowl, flipped oatmeal at R; Harley--refused to feed her; Brush Teeth--when told to read schedule, stuck foot in toilet, did it again when I put R in bed to deal with him, crawled into bed after told to dry off

July 9: Breakfast--refused to get piece of paper for list, punched me on way to table; Harley--scratched me on the arm, pretended to sleep, threw a book at me and hit R instead

July 10: Harley--scratched and bit me, threw a book, coaster and stuffed animal, crumpled schedule

July 13: when told to clean up Nana's playroom, threw toys, hit, kicked, bit, spit at me

July 22: Brush teeth/wash face-- scratched, tried to bite, threw books, etc.

Do you sense a theme, my friends?

I believe I've told you that Jeffrey in the morning is basically a ball of energy poinging without direction off of every surface. Getting him ready and out the door on time requires a lot of work on my part, strict adherence to the schedule, no problems with River, and occasional chanting as I walk backwards through the house. I find myself saying, frequently, "I hate mornings."

But reading this notebook, I realize how good I actually have it now. Because I might be brushing his teeth for him because he can't manage to do it without getting lost between the sink and the toilet, but I'm not dodging his claws or fangs now. I'm not dodging books or kicks. And neither is River.

Of course, not all is sunshine and rose-scented poots in NotHannah land. River continues to be the biggest pill in the tiniest body ever...and the loudest. Lawsy, the child is loud. And we've realized that Jeffrey is becoming too wrapped up in the world of his technologies (computer and Playstation 2, mainly) and is melting down when we don't lay a schedule out for him. We've gotten a little lax about that and I'm, frankly, spending too much time doing non-mommy stuff when the kids are up and about.

However, the fixes to those problems are fairly simple: follow a schedule and be more attentive parents. We know what works now.

It isn't four months ago, when we were slaves to the uncertainty and the raging chemicals in a little boy's body. Four months ago, watching him spin out of control and freak out because he was hungry or couldn't find sand fleas or had to wash his hands, we thought we'd never get it right. We thought we were losing our boy. We despaired.

And now...it's better. It's not perfect. He's still a totally weird kid and he broke down into hysterical tears tonight because we wouldn't let him watch River finish her Dora game (do I need tell you that River cried when we told her to get off and then cried all through bath and bedtime...didn't think so.)

BUT

He didn't hit us. He didn't kick. He didn't spit or bite or fling objects around the room.

Four months. It feels like years.

Surprise!

Ya know, the world continues to surprise me every day. And by "surprise," I mean "make me want to bang my head against a wall." Not in a violent way, but more like a wanting-to-get-dizzy-enough-that-this-makes-any-sense-whatsoever way. The ridiculous thing is that many of the things that surprise me actually surprise me on a regular basis, so I pretty much shouldn't be surprised by them, and yet when they happen, there I am standing around with my mouth hanging open, going, "Whaaaaa?"

Not Hannah's List of Surprising Things That Shouldn't Surprise Her Anymore:

1. Christians who are confused by non-Christians who think Jesus was way cool. It's weird to me that folks who worship a deity don't seem to believe that deity is worthy of any sort of consideration by anyone other than those who worship him. I mean, Jesus is a fairly influential person by historical standards, being that he is pretty much responsible for a Jewish sect that has shaped the world. That aside, many of his teachings in the Gospels are both universal and sound: take care of your neighbors, worry about your own soul instead of somebody else's, don't run around judging folks. I would say that those are bits of advice that all people on the face of the planet would do well to live by. In fact, I would go further and say that if every person on the face of the planet truly lived by those rules, then the crap we have to deal with (from the failing economy to abortion to war to a compromised food supply) would not exist. How could it? The truth is that most people (at least the onesI know) don't choose a non-Christian path in life because of problems with Christianity's central deity. The problems arise with the leaders and believers who choose to willingly be hypocrites while practicing a religion whose central deity had nothing but contempt for hypocrites. Please note that I'm not making a blanket statement here; clearly, not all Christians are hypocrites. Unfortunately, the ones who are seem to have the loudest voices and biggest wallets.
   
2. The jelly on processed meat products. I mean, it's just gross, right? Where does that jelly come from? No, don't tell me. I really don't want to know. I'm going to pretend that it's nature's way of protecting it from alien invasion. (OMFC, what if it IS an alien invasion?)
   
3. Christians who don't believe that non-Christians pray or believe in prayer. A connection with a deity or entity worthy of worship, be it Yahweh or Allah or Ra or Brigid or the Filing Cabinet, pretty much relies on prayer to forge that connection. Linguistically, one can find prayer that existed tens of thousands of years ago. Over a million years ago, people used stones as prayer objects. People, it would seem, are born to pray. Of course, not all non-Christians pray, but many of us do, and we do so with the idea that our prayer will be heard by an entity who will do something with the energy we are directing at it. Otherwise, we'd all just be talking to ourselves or wasting our candles. And you KNOW how we feel about misusing petroleum products.
   
4. The Georgia Bulldogs not being able to correct the same problems they've had all year long. This season has been disappointing, to say the least, and yet every game I'm THERE, wearing my red and/or black, making finger foods, telling the players that I believe in them. (We have a psychic connection.) But by the second quarter, I'm usually surfing the internet or curling up for a nice long nap to get away from the horror of interceptions and eighty million penalties. We're going to the Kentucky game with Jeffrey and I swear, I don't think I can bear it if we lose. Seriously. It might require therapy.
5. Conservatives who believe that liberals want to take away rights. This is insane to me. I just have no idea how this idea came around. The only "right" that liberals want to take away from people is the "right" to deny other people rights. If somebody else can come up with a right being removed by liberal legislators, I'd love to hear it. While you're at it, please let me know what "rights" conservatives are protecting.
6. Carrie Prejean continuing to play the shameless victim. The girl got her boobs paid for, posed for semi-nude photos, and apparently made a video of of herself masturbating and yet she's still rocking the "the liberal media is so mean to me" angle. The things she did are not, for me, particularly disturbing. However, I'm thinking they SHOULDN'T jibe with the religious right wonks who are using her as an example of all things good and holy. EXCEPT--the wonks keep using her, which is even more surprising. You can almost hear their thought process, "But she's so prriiiddddyyyyyy. She looks like an annngggeeellll. And she doesn't like gay people, so WOOHOO!" Frankly, those folks ought to consider leaning a little harder on Kirk Cameron's shoulder. He's been in "Tiger Beat" AND knows Alan Thicke AND apparently is good at playing firemen. Everybody loves firemen.
7. The number of applications I have to keep hiding on Facebook. I mean, I am thrilled that you saved a cow or bought a fish or received a heart or killed a dude in Cuba. Rock the frick on. Follow your bliss. But I don't want to know about it every time I log on and I swear, there is a new application I'm hiding every day. Today, I hid some kind of wedding thing, a God Wants You to Know (Really? God is using FB now? Can you FAN God? Add him as a friend? Can you send God a sparkly heart?) thingy, and another frickin' fish application. How many fish applications are there, for the love of Pete? WHY are there so many? (If you use these applications and love them, I hope I haven't hurt your feelings. I still think you are a SUPER person and hope that you become the ruler of Farmville--which is totally a communistic game. Just saying.)
8. Stinky mushrooms. What the hell, Mother Nature? Not only do I have to worry about River eating them, I now have to worry about Jeffrey getting them on his shoes and then losing his ever-loving mind over the smell. And washing his hands. And sniffing his fingers until I want to fall down in a heap and moan a bit.
   
9. Glenn Beck.