Seuss

I’m a sucker for comments, but spam comments? Which Akismet so brilliantly wrangles and packages in a neat, tidy little list for me to scan before I delete with one fell keystroke?

This Girl = SUCK-AH!

With this blog being so new and my footprint these days being so small, my spam comments are pretty paltry at the moment, but tonight? Winning!

Here. I must share the badness.

“I notice you happen to be are actually obsessed with like! We are now attempting to build my personal online site also, you need solved the problem which includes amazing knowledge.”

I mean, really, the first sentence just stands on its own – like, I really DO happen to be am actually obsessed with like! – but add in that last phrase – “you need solved the problem which includes amazing knowledge” – and it is pure GENIUS. If the problem includes amazing knowledge, leave it to me to fix it with complete idiocy! Huzzah!

Am I trying too hard? Yeah, probably, but I’m in my own friggen bed for the first time in a week with a puppy dreaming on my feet and I can’t sleep because Hubs is snoring in my ear and the doctor won’t refill my sleeping pills so the giddiness of homedom is a bit overwhelming therefore I must vomit it all over teh internets!!

{gaaaaaaasp}

Should I add that the link included was what totally took the cake?

Packersfansproshop.com

Stinkin’ cheeseheads! Go Panthers!

So I’m sitting here in the World’s Smallest Airport* on a three hour delay with Earl waiting to fly back home.  Or close to home.  When we headed down here, we drove two hours from home, past our local metro international airport, to a little airport in another corner of the state all to save a few dollars in airfare (Hi, Dad!).  When we landed, we off-loaded via what looks like a tricked out scissor lift onto the tarmac.  Currently, the tricked out scissor lift is sitting outside the doors of the gates (Gates 1A and 1B, the only gates, lead straight out onto the tarmac via sliding glass doors), and there is not a plane in sight.  Ours, after all, is late.  Hence, the delay.

The last time I off-loaded onto a tarmac, I was in high school, and we were at my hometown airport – the one where you have to land, go over the hill, swerve around the pothole, and hope to slow down enough to make the U-turn lest you end up in the trees.  We had flown down on a friend’s 6-seater jet to take two Russian bankers to Epcot, then circled my little hometown for an hour because of a thunderstorm over the airport.  By the time we landed, I was green and too sick to notice whether or not we hit the pothole.  It was hard to avoid.

The ride back to the airport two hours from home today looks like it might be a bumpy one.  I hate planes, and I hate the thought of being 30,000 feet up and hitting bumps.  This does not set well with me.  Earl is excited, although her favorite part of the trip was three hours ago when we went through security.  Kid LOVES going through security.  She BEGS to get body scanned.  Of course, they don’t.  They don’t even make her take her shoes off.  Party poopers.

Moments ago, the lady who makes the announcements with a microphone she doesn’t need in this tiny space with 583 ceiling tiles (yes, I counted, TPO), said the pilot had called in and said he was 20 minutes out.

This does not help my faith in this flight.

Pray.  Please.  Because, egad, I’d rather off-load on a tarmac than in the middle of a field somewhere.

 

*It’s totally not the World’s Smallest Airport, but it sure as hell feels like it today.

It’s so hard to dance like nobody’s watching, especially when at times it feels the world is caving in on you.

Somehow, many years ago, my father found my blog and read it and complained that I shouldn’t be spewing my complaints all over the web. At the time, 2002, I had about 2,000 hits a month. I was linked on some pretty popular blogs. Yet that one comment killed my mojo.

I am determined to get it back.

This morning Earl woke up at 5:15 and asked for a cup of decaf. I told her to go back to bed, which she promptly did, comatose. I, however, was left awake trying to figure out how an avid coffee hater like myself has a 7 year-old who wakes up in a hotel room and thinks about decaf before she even thinks about going to the bathroom. The past several weeks have been hectic and I have a copious number of unread beloveds in my feed reader, so I started catching up.

Know how sometimes inspiration has been around the corner the entire time? The first blog I went to catch up belongs to one of my favorite neighbors (yes, the hermit is allowed to play favorites – I have four, if you must know*), Stepford Life.

My God, how I want that voice back. That ability to share, that honesty. I need it back. Heather does it so well, and largely without fear. I adore that. She can claim its borne of insanity all she wants, but this summer, I’ve been blessed to spend a handful of days with Heather and our other neighbor, Tricia, and they can both just put it all out there, online and in person. Risky? Hell yeah, but I look back and remember when I can do that – back before that little comment acted as wrecking ball to my creative freedom….I have always been awkward and shy in person, and that’s rough enough. But being able to be the honest me in front of a few was what kept me sane some days. I still feel like the people who know me best are the people who knew me first online, and that’s just sad.

So here’s to changing that. Here’s to finding that voice that’s been muted for a decade and putting Me on these pages. Here’s to dancing like nobody’s watching and blogging like nobody’s reading.

Which, um, they’re not. Here’s to not blaming them! I wouldn’t read me over the past decade either.

{*I cheat. There’s only four of them that speak to me! Ha!}

It’s time for me to lay my perfection down. Things aren’t perfect. I am not perfect, and I just need to get used to that.

I am never going to be the perfect parent, the perfect wife, or the perfect room mother. My mediation skills, tediously negotiating the rocky field between sugar-amped and overtired kids, will never be anywhere approaching perfect. Nor will my patience.

I am never going to be the perfect massage therapist, the perfect writer, or the perfect photographer. There are techniques I will never perfect, never master. And some in which I won’t even become fully competent.

I will never be a perfect grammarian.

I am never going to stop putting two spaces after each period. I will never stop writing like I talk. Some habits are too ingrained to ever be perfected-out.

Heaven knows I will never be the perfect friend. I am at times too selfish, at times too depressed, at times to introverted, and at times too pissed at the world. And at times too just plain tired.

I will never stop wondering if I can slip a nip of Jack in the empty space at the top of my Coke bottle unnoticed, though I will probably never actually try. I will never love doing laundry or talking on the phone. I will never tire of watching bad TV or eating an entire box of Samoas at one sitting, though my waist would probably appreciate it if I did.

I will never have an easy time making friends, never have a hard time driving off the ones I do make. I will probably never feel significant in a group or in my element in the middle of a posse. And, chances are, I will never be able to accept a shaker of salt directly from your hand, so don’t even try. I don’t like to fight.

I will, however, always help my friends in any way I can. I will always hug my daughter whenever she asks (and sometimes when she doesn’t), always tell my mother I love her as we part, and always return my father’s phone calls from here on out. I will always try to look on the brighter side of the darkness, always know from whence I came, and always be able to remember random, useless crap. I will never use a calculator unless long division or crazy multiplication is involved and a pencil isn’t available – or unless you go all pre-calculus on me. And I will always do my damnedest to be true to myself, even if that means pushing my own boundaries a little here and there.

Yes, I have my good parts and my bad. I need to learn to accept them all for what they are, accept me for who I am. I have spent too many years striving for perfection, failing hourly, then turning right around and using that failure as a frying pan with which to beat myself over the head.

Never again will I wonder why I always have a headache.