Life In Sixty Seconds or Less

I've been really neglecting this blog, and I'm sorry. I tend to post more frequently in my Yahoo 360, and to be honest, with my new grad school career just starting, and with the election 2 weeks away, and with my body very suddenly rebelling against the overwhelming lack of sleep... well... don't expect too much from me here for a while. That said, this is my life in a nutshell:

1) Working my butt off, long hours, evil commute, laughable pay, but a cause I can believe in, so for now it will hold me.

2) Kids are adjusting wonderfully well to our new state and our new family life, and getting bigger every day. The Clone turned 11 one month ago, Little Bit turned 5 today, and Red will be 10 in January. Hard to believe my girls are so big.

3) Started my Master of Nonprofit Management degree and am feeling sufficiently in-over-my-head, but hey, it's all good.

4) Helplessly hopelessly madly in love with Cole, who surprised the heck out of me by loving me right back. In fact, in February he's moving up here and we're going to give this "happy family" thing a shot. We do it pretty well in small-to-medium doses, so I have a feeling that it being the five of us every day, will be no sweat. Of course, like our move this summer, I haven't yet told the girls about this big change. We'll break that to them over the holidays - if you hear loud and delighted squeals of joy sometime between Christmas and New Year's, it's probably them.

5) I'm tired and there's a dirty kitchen waiting for me, so that will have to be it for now. I'll try to do a better job of keeping up, but meantime, if you want more frequent postings, you might check my 360... I just don't have the energy right now to create two blogs' worth of interesting posts with any regularity (some would argue I don't create one blog's worth)...

Do You Believe In Magic?

Loading the dishwasher tonight, a few random lyrics danced through my head. They're from a song by my future husband Don Henley, off the Inside Job album, called "Everything Is Different Now" and they go a lil' somethin' like this:

She said, I dont care what you do for a living.
She said, I dont care what kind of car you drive.
All I want to know right now is what do you believe in
And what it means to you to be alive.

An interesting question - what do you believe in? Which of course took me to Robert Fulghum, the guy who wrote "All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Great book, as are its successors (not predecessors, but successors, Dear Sir!), and in the first one, he also talks about, as I recall, his Storyteller's Creed - "I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -That myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -That hope always triumphs over experience -That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death." Now, in and of itself that's good enough to end this post and say that my work here is done. Except it's not, because I haven't put anything of myself out there. So here is a partial list of things I believe in.

I believe that you owe respect to everyone, not just your elders, but if they do something to lose that respect, they need to earn it back regardless of age.

I believe in forgiveness, though I'm not always perfect at practicing it.

I believe that the person who makes dinner shouldn't have to do the dishes.

I believe that sometimes the person who makes dinner should do the dishes anyway, just because.

I believe that sometimes, what's kind is more important than what's fair.

I believe that most times, what's right is more important than what's kind.

I believe in magic, and in angels, and in spirits, and in God, and I don't believe any of those things excludes any other.

I believe that for each of us there is at least one someone out there who is the yin to our yang, the bread to our butter, the Sonny to our Cher, and the Jekyll to our Hyde - and that's not always a significant other, that might just be a treasured friend.

I believe in buying Girl Scout Cookies, magazines, wrapping paper, and anything else sold as a fundraiser by earnest children with a hopeful smile.

And I, too, believe that love is stronger than death.

One of My Greatest Wishes

Representative Foley has resigned over inappropriate e mails and instant messages with young men, some underage, most (if not all) former White House pages.

Rumsfeld refuses to resign over what many believe are grave errors in war policy.

My kingdom for a young man seduced over the Internet by Rumsfeld!!!

Leather and Lace

by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley

Is love so fragile... And the heart so hollow
Shatter with words... Impossible to follow
You're saying I'm fragile... I try not to be
I search only... for something I cant see
I have my own life... and I am stronger than you know
But I carry this feelin when you walked into my house
That you wont be walking out the door
Still I carry this feeling when you walked into my house
That you wont be walking out the door

Lovers forever...face to face
My city, your mountains
Stay with me, stay
I need you to love me
I need you today
Give to me your leather...
Take from me...my lace

You in the moonlight with your sleepy eyes
Could you ever love a man like me
And you were right, when I walked into your house
I knew Id never want to leave
Sometimes I'm a strong man
Sometimes cold and scared and sometimes I cry
But that time I saw you, I knew with you to light my nights
Somehow I'd get by

Lovers forever...face to face
My city, your mountains
Stay with me, stay
I need you to love me, I need you today
Give to me your leather
Take from me...my lace

Lovers forever...face to face
My city, your mountains...stay with me, stay
I need you to love me...I need you to stay
Give to me your leather
Take from me...my lace
Take from me...my lace
Take from me...my lace

I Miss My Friend...

A confluence of different events and thoughts have conjured up a subject I don't often talk about, and while I thought I would keep this one between me and me, something is telling me to talk about it. Actually, someone is telling me to talk about it. Susan is.

Susan shows up every now and then to remind me that I'm not alone, that I deserve happiness, that I tend to make life more complicated than it needs to be. Susan reminds me to simplify, and to try to take care of myself as well as I take care of others. This wouldn't be that unusual, I suppose - if Susan were still alive. But four and a half years ago, give or take, Susan lost her battle with depression and took her own life.

There were so many ironies in that, but the biggest one was that Susan felt everyone would be better off without her. She felt like she couldn't quite find her place in life, and that led her to feel like she didn't quite have a place in life. The irony, at least for me, is that Susan was one of those people I wanted to be like when I grew up. Never mind that she was a few years younger than me. I was already a mother of two when we met, and I always sort of saw Susan as who and what I might have been if I hadn't chosen to be a mother at a relatively young age. She was so much fun, so energetic, so passionate, and so bright. I never would have guessed what she was going through. She never let me see. Little Bit was only six months old when Susan died, and they had just met for the first time the week before (she had moved a few hours away not long before the baby was born). I can still remember how happy and peaceful she looked, holding the baby. I had been unable to bring the big girls to that visit, and I will always regret that they didn't get to see their "Auntie Susan" one more time. But she's still around. No, not just the memory of her, not just the idle thought of "what would Susan think about that" or "what would her advice be." No, nothing that ordinary. Susan is actually physically here with me sometimes. (Or is that psychically?) Susan's spirit checks in with me every now and then, sometimes through dreams, once in a message sent to me through her father, but every now and then, even when I'm wide awake, I feel her. I know she's here, and I know she's looking out for me.

In life and in death, Susan worried a lot about me, especially about the choices I've made when it comes to relationships. More than once, she's expressed her vehement disapproval over people and situations - she's much less diplomatic since she died. But right now, she's happy. Happy about the choices and changes I'm making in my life, happy that I'm finally on track to the life she thinks I deserve, the happiness she thinks I deserve. I just wish with all my heart that she had realized that she deserved that kind of happiness too.

My Two Cents

I'm one of probably a billion or so bloggers writing on this topic in the next 24 hours or so, but I'll live with the spectre of unoriginality looming over my head. After all, it's a big event.

Of course. It's the inevitable 9-11 blog. People of my mother's generation remember where they were and what they were doing when Kennedy was shot. For my grandparents it was the end of the Great War. People my age or a little older can at least remember when John Lennon was killed. But now even children the age of The Clone and Red can remember 9-11 and the days that followed.

Me, I was 8 months pregnant with Little Bit. I was working in a mental health organization, her daddy was going to school and we shared a car. We also gave rides to two of his classmates who lived in our area of town, quite a ways away from the school. So each morning, either he would drop me off at work and then continue on to school with our passengers, or I would drop them all off at school and then head to work. On September 11, he was dropping me off, and we were running a little late, as usual. Just as we were pulling in to the parking lot at my office, we heard a news report that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. The natural assumption, at the time, was that it was some horrible accident. (Would it ever cross your mind to think that today?)nnBut even as we sat in the car listening to the news and making morbid jokes about how blind the pilot must have been to have just not seen such a big building, they announced that another plane had flown into the other tower. You could literally see on all of our faces, the moment that it sunk in. Oh shit. This is no accident.

Well, we could just forget about getting anything done at work that day, but my coworkers and I stayed there. The TV in the common room of the clinic where I officed, stayed on all day. Staff and consumers alike sat in silence as we watched footage. We must have seen those planes hit half a million times, as the stations ran it in almost a loop... over and over and over again, towers collapsing, people screaming, crying, running in the streets... news of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, and into that field in Pennsylvania - that news came, and a little bit of footage with it, but mostly it was the towers. Little Bit's daddy showed up with his classmates in tow; their classes had been cancelled for the day. They joined us as we all sat watching. I remember that every so often I would be surprised to suddenly feel wetness on my cheeks; I was crying without even realizing it. I remember worrying for the daughters I was already raising, and flat-out panicking for the one I was carrying... knowing that the shock and grief I was feeling would affect her more deeply. Wondering what right I had, to be bringing her into such a scary world, especially when I didn't have the resources I felt I would need, to shelter her, to protect her, to keep her from harm. I bet a lot of expectant and new parents had that same feeling that day.

Well, as it does with everything, time went on. Five years now, has gone on. In some ways, most of us are much the same as we were on September 10, 2001. In other ways, our nation, our whole world, has changed. Something was taken from us that day that we will never get back. But, being the eternal cockeyed optimist, I like to thing something was given to us that day, too. A gift. The gift of knowing not to take things for granted. The gift of appreciating the things we have while we still have them. And the gift of those first several, glorious days when we as Americans were more united than we have ever been.

RMM Weird Quote of the Day, September 10

"I wouldn't put up with your bubbles."

RMM Weird Quotes of the Day, September 9

"Why'd you put the ponies in his butt?"

"You can't be too fast picking up turtles."