Back In the Saddle

Well, hello there!

What’s that law that says a body at rest stays at rest? I have come to the conclusion that this also applies to laptops, since it’s been full on forever since I posted here.

I have some reasons for blowing off my blog lately and they go like this:

It’s summer, which means my kids are home, which means more requests to drive them all over the godforsaken universe Los Angeles. There are also more dirty dishes, more brother on brother fights, more late nights, and more sudden uncontrollable urges to pile everyone in the car to get salted caramel frozen yogurt. In other word, there’s shit to do, y’all.

 Camp NaNOWriMo. I signed up, announced it here and (spoiler alert) totally failed at it.

Lucky for me, failing is the new winning! And because I failed at completing my word-count goal for the month of July , I finally learned that I don’t do so well with external rewards and “challenges” to make me do things, even if they’re things I really want to do.

Maybe you’re like that too. To find out, take this short quiz: When someone asks you to join their “30 Days of Tongue-Kissing Selfies With Your Spouse” challenge, do you right away kind of know on some very deep cellular level that those are not your people? If so, you’re like me!

While it might be a very good thing if I would meditate daily, write a screenplay or eat more legumes, signing up for that kind of accountability mind trick is not the way to get me there. Unfortunately, I’m just not that motivated by fear of public shaming. If I was that scared of shame I would never have given myself a home perm or done all that musical theatre in my twenties.

So I failed at writing 30,000 words of a fictional story during the month of July, but I succeeded at writing 16,000. And guess what? No one gives a shit. Yay!

Trump. I’m sure I could just stop right there because you probably completely get why I couldn’t bring myself to write blog posts about my little life in the San Fernando Valley when our country is fucking itself up so royally. Did I spend more time than I should have watching videos like this? Yes. Could I have used that time to write? Does it do any good to watch Trump flaunt his idiocy? Would my time be better used getting active in local politics instead of eating my weight in pickle flavored potato chips and inhaling toxic youtube videos? Yes, no, yes and stop yelling at me.

Black people keep getting shot by police, like, just because they’re black. And yes, some police are  getting shot too. Everyone keeps getting fucking shot, you guys! And  if while all that is happening, I sit around and blog about stuff like menstruation and Facebook  I can’t help but imagine people doing this:

It’s not that there haven’t been things happening in my life that I want to write about. Plenty of things happened this summer which I might eventually share here, but for now just let me just get you up to speed:

Our family road trip was great, and by great I mean that I saw parts of the United States I’d never seen before, we all still love each other, and only one of us got food poisoning from a  corn dog. 

In July, my husband took the boys with him to the east coast for five days and I had the house to myself, which hasn’t happened in, well, ever.

No, wait. Go back and read that last thing again. If you’re a mom with kids, feel free to flip me off for even complaining for one second about the chaos of summer break.

I know, Mama. I know.

Having that time to myself was so great. Now, I could have used that time to write, but did I?

(I think we’ve established that that’s a negatory.)

Instead, I spent the time making these and binge watching all five seasons of Girls on HBO.  I did, however clean my venetian blinds, which took three whole hours, so, you know, props to me.

I also read a whole bunch of memoirs, including Lit, Cherry, Slow Motion and Safekeeping. All wonderful. All make me want to stop writing and take up scrapbooking.

And finally, there’s another thing.

Recently I learned that my dear friend, therapist, and mentor will not survive the cancer that she discovered not even a year ago. (Have I mentioned how much I hate cancer? You too? No shit.)

She is an angel to me and many people I know and, you’ll just have to trust me on this, if you knew her, you too would want to throw in the towel on trying to make sense of life and why it ends when it does.

You’d shake your weak mortal fist at the sky and tell whoever is or isn’t up their that they have lousy fucking judgement! Get it together, would you??! You’d bring wine and food to the family of your dying friend and feel helpless in the face of their suffering. And you’d think about how your own mother died almost exactly a year ago, and how, even though you were there in the room with her when her gaze went fixed and the nurse turned off the machine, you didn’t feel it like this, like you do now.

And the force of what you’re feeling now would pull the memory of your mother up,

up,

by the roots,

like it

or not.

Well, at least that’s what it’s like for me.

So, thanks for reading, and for visiting here again even though I disappeared for a bit. We all need to give ourselves permission to disappear, to have the chips and drop the ball occasionally, right?

There’s your thirty day challenge, right there: Give yourself a goddamn break. It’s ok.

It’s really ok.