Today on the way home from school I heard Indigo Girls' "Closer to Fine" come up on the radio. It's an old song now, but then I am old, too, I suppose. I don't love it any less fiercely than I ever did, but instead it is like an old quilt wrapping around me, warming the air surrounding my body and leaving me happier than I was just a moment previously. It is the same feeling I get when I hear Simon and Garfunkel's "Coming Home" or Cat Stevens' "Moonshadow."
I know, you're gagging on the imaginary Patchouli fog floating out of your screen right about now, sorry. I yam who I yam.
And right now, I am a woman looking down the barrel of three and a half more days of school this year - my first year of teaching in a public school classroom. I knew I would love this job, but I didn't know how MUCH I would love it. the answer to that is So Very Much. Ridiculously much. I should have done it years ago, when this song was new. But, I try not to have regrets. So I'm a little nostalgic and yet so very ready for summer, all at the same time.
So much has happened to my little family this past year, and I've not been able to share very much of it here. It hasn't all been good, it hasn't all been bad, but it probably will make for a good story someday. Perhaps at some point and time in the future, when emotions are a little less raw, and it would be easier to look back and laugh instead of wallow in it, I can tell the tale.
Overall, despite all of this, I'm really pretty happy. Yeah, we're stressed. But we're healthy. The weather is nice. We have food on the table, and clean sheets on the bed. The hard stuff will go away soon enough. In this, I have faith.
And until then, I have plenty of wine to tide me over.
Yes I know it's Easter. But that's how it works, apparently, for me to find time to write. Another beautiful Sunday afternoon to myself while the kids play outside and I try to fend off the nap I've wanted since drinking two glasses of wine at brunch.
I've been busy. Not just with work and carpool and laundry, either. A couple of weeks ago I discovered The Hunger Games Trilogy. I mean, I knew it was out there, I just hadn't had time to start it. I think part of me knew that I would need to clear time to read it all together, which is exacty what happened. But when the movie came out and Drew wanted to go see it, I figured I better read it first. I started on a Thursday evening, and finished Sunday morning at 2:30am. All three books.
So, I've been reading. And reading, and re-reading. I didn't think I loved it that much after I read it the first time through, in fact, I was kind of upset about it. But then I realized I was angry because it was over, not because I didn't like it. I keep re-reading it for one reason: I keep hoping to find more in the story. Because I don't really want that to be all there is to it. I keep hoping to find a sentence I missed, a nugget of detail that satisfies my need to know these characters more than I already do. It angered me, reading these books, mostly the second one, Catching Fire, because the ending left me so distraught for the characters that I couldn't fathom not finding out more, and so I began reading the third book at 10pm on a Saturday night and read it straight through until 2:30 in the morning. The dog was quite content to keep me company downstairs on the couch while I listened to my husband snore through the floorboards as background noise while I inhaled the story.
I haven't read like this for a while. Probably not since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I will admit to you that I sucked down the Twilight Series, all four books, over the course of a week, the last two over consecutive days of a weekend. But I didn't re-read them. I liked it, it was good fun, but I didn't feel the need to keep going back. I didn't want to prevent the story of Bella and Edward from being over. I could let them go - unlike Katniss and Peeta, people who felt such a part of my life I can't allow them to fall out of my immediate conciousness. This is what makes a great story, to me.
Last weekend I took Drew to see the movie. He read all three books before I did, and had been looking forward to it. He's just 11 and a half, true, and it's a pretty violent story. But I don't really worry about what he sees in the movies, especially if we are going with him and then can help him process what he sees, and even more so if he's read the story beforehand. We're talking about a child who read all seven Harry Potter books the summer between 3rd and 4th grade, one right after another. He's read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of The Ring, and all of Rick Riordan's Olympian's series. (If I could only get him to inhale food instead of pages with such fervor.)
It made me remember the novels and short stories I read as a child that left me with the same raw emotion that these books did. Black Stallion. The Color Purple. Flowers In The Attic. The Stand. Clan of The Cave Bear. Centennial. The Veldt. I was a precocious reader, you may be thinking.
The Veldt. Oh Ray Bradbury - how did you know children could be so evil? I knew - I had met them at school - they were in my class. But adults don't like to admit these things. Yet here he was, writing about it for all to see. Mesmerizing. Much like The Hunger Games.
Here's the thing. People keep saying kids younger than 12 shouldn't read it, or see the movie. That it's too violent, a story about children murdering each other. Do they not remember Lord of The Flies? The Veldt? Roald Dahl's The Swan? Or Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, for that matter? Have these people even read the great young adult fiction of our history? Or have we bleached ourselves and our kids of such horrific violence so that they don't recognize it when they see it?
Children can be mean. Children can be murderous. No more and no less than adults. It shocks us when children in stories act this way, instead of the innocent. Violence isn't the moral lesson, humanity is. The point behind these stories is the humanity that lies between.
I was never more glad to read the news this week than to find the movie Bully was finally granted a PG-13 rating. We can't keep trying to protect our children from violence, they are already experiencing it, seeing it, reading it. We need to teach them how to interpret it, how to learn from it. And how to be above it.
* For the record, there is a huge difference to me between a violent story with a greater message of society and say, Fight Club. I think he can wait a few years to read that one.
**I feel the need to defend against some (ahem, husband..) who will give me a hard time because I don't like to let my kids play violent video games but I'm not worried about books and movies. It's the development of character caught up in violence that matters. There is not much character development in the video games my kids want, and there's certainly no moral. (At least not beyond good guy vs. bad guy. That's not enough, for me. )
Spring Break has flown by, as I guess a week of staycation is wont to do, and now it's Friday and I've no idea what happened. Actually, that's partly because of the fairly epic, last minute neighborhood happy hour that lasted from 4-10 pm last night. What, that's never happened to you? You've never taken a bottle of wine down to the culdesac to chat for a few minutes and then three hours later decided to start throwing frozen pizzas into various ovens and setting them out so the "starving" little yard hobbits will stop whining about being hungry for FIVE MINUTES so you can have one more splash of wine? And then somebody turned on the fire pit, and brought out the marshmallows and various accoutrements, and as I was falling into bed a few hours later I wondered on which porch was my husband still sitting with the daddies, because we're like 14 year olds at a school dance and the moms were all at one house and the dads were all at a different house and the children and dogs ran wild through open gates between the two like some sort of modern Lord of the Flies, only with manicured lawns. And I'm pretty sure they all went to bed dirty. My youngest son is in fact wearing the same clothes he wore on Wednesday. But not hungry! And then around 10:30 pm I heard my oldest son and two other 12 year old boys descend upon my pantry. They were mostly disappointed, I think.
Anyway, that was a good time. And so has been the rest of our Spring Break, except the part where I had Whooping Cough. You know, when my husband came home from his own urgent care visit two weeks ago and said he had Whooping Cough, I told him his doctor is an idiot. But no, after spending my birthday last Sunday on the sofa coughing my brains out, I went to the doctor first thing Monday morning and indeed, I had Whooping Cough. Pertussis, as it's officially called, even though I had a booster five years ago. Thanks very much to the little germ factories at my school, sneezing and coughing on the keyboards in my computer lab.
Sometimes there's just not enough hand sanitizer in the world. And I think the administration might frown upon making them use it as a mouth rinse anyway, so what can you do.
So yeah, I'm 40 now. My tolerance for drinking cheap wine without much dinner (see above re: dirty little yard hobbits ate it all) is not as ingrained as it used to be, as evidenced by my current headache. Or that could be because I slept next to an open window, and my allergies are pissed. Have I mentioned the weather? It went from mid-30's overnight lows to mid-60's, with highs around 80 all week. We really got a spring weather on Spring Break! It's like Florida, with the humidity and everything. We've opened the house up to allow a breeze to move through, and there's a layer of dust and pollen on everything now. Because I've not been cleaning very much this week. I've been busy doing projects like painting doors and lunching with friends and shopping for more projects and standing barefoot in my driveway chatting with neighbors I haven't seen since October. And drinking cheap Chardonnay. Busy, I tell you. And now it is Friday and I guess I better start doing some laundry so we can go back to school next week.
Do you remember this book? Drew loved it when he was in kindergarten. We read it all the time. Almost as much as we had read Tumble Bumble when he was a toddler. But Alexander and his little pity party have been running through my head all week, as at each turn something else seems to happen which makes me feel like going back to bed and pulling the covers over my head. That or drinking heavily. Which I never seem to have time for, now that I'm old and I require more time to recuperate.
Binge drinking options aside, mostly I just run a hot bath and snuggle up in my bed. Right now I'm snuggled up in bed with the dog at my feet and my nine year old snoring next to me, noticing how badly he needs a haircut. Oh well.
But this week. THIS WEEK. People, it is sort of ridiculous what friends and family have been going through. Here's a short list:
a friend had a stroke, and remains hospitalized, in a coma. She is a wonderful dear sweet thing and we are all devastated for her.
a child had a seizure at school, at dismissal time, in front of all the other kids. He is fine now, but it was terrifying.
A friend said goodnight one last time to her dog and lost her wedding ring within the last week.
My poor dad got a trojan on his computer so nasty it ate everything on his hard drive. I could do nothing to clean it except try and save the backup drive, but he's lost all his emails going back probably a year. I tried for an hour and couldn't get around it, leaving me feeling impotent in my IT skills.
This morning I backed out of the garage a little to close to the side, and tore the side mirror off the passenger side of the car. The new car, that just this week we've had for one year.
There's more, but it's much more personal and health related regarding people I've promised not to discuss here. But it's scary and we're helpless and it just pushes us closer to "Really? How much more can we take" territory. I try not to ask that question aloud, as I fear the response is more suckage.
But tomorrow is Friday. The weekend should be nice, and Monday is a holiday, no school. A little extra time to recuperate and take some deep breaths, maybe peek out from under the covers. Hopefully we can all emerge Monday from our pity party and start anew.
Tempting fate is not one of my lessons easily learned, however, as it was by that Wednesday afternoon my 11 year old had been sick with a high fever for two days. We were not going out to eat at my brother's place, nor would we be served a glass of hoppy chocolate yumminess the next day, as the keg was tapped and sold out in about 8 hours. Oops.
My nearby Lukas Liquors had a recording on the phone announcing they were sold out. The World Market store clerk said "Oh yeah, we had some. For about 15 minutes."
Hmmph. Epic Fail.
Finally, after many calls, we found a liquor store that was getting in a new shipment and taking names for a waiting list. We dutifully left our name, and then went in the next morning to collect our prize. $15 for a litre bottle. (I heard later people were selling it on eBay for a lot more.)
Having caught a Facebook conversation in which my friend Average Jane suggested the Chocolate Ale would be better served closer to room temperature, we brought it of the fridge and let it sit for about 20 minutes before snapping off the Champagne-like cork contraption. And then we swirled and sipped, as if it were a glass of Pinot being served on a terra cotta patio in Napa Valley.
And it was good. Really, really good.
The chocolate kicks in more in the aftertaste than in the sip itself. My husband and I found ourselves polishing off that litre a little too fast, a little too easy. It's probably good this stuff isn't around for the regular part of the year.We shared the other bottle with friends we had over for the Super Bowl. It disappeared in minutes.
Here's some other good news: if you didn't get any Chocolate Ale in the frenzy of the past few weeks, never fear. A little bird tells me some restaurants may be holding some back to serve on Valentine's Day. Call around to your favorite places, because I'm not giving up my secret source.
Now that I have a "real" job for the first time in 12 years, and by "real" I mean one which requires me to leave the house every day dressed in something besides yoga pants, I find my overall wardrobe lacking any sense of direction. This is partly because my fashion style is not really a recognizable category. I'm not traditional, I'm not modern, I'm certainly not couture. I'm still the thrifty fashionista* that I've always been, meaning that I'll buy scarves from the Target dollar bin, and then try and figure out an outfit around it. I do this with any number of clearance items, jewelry, shoes, etc.
It's not really the best fashion plan, trying to build an outfit around one particular piece. And yet I keep doing it. Mostly because I like to claim that I don't do very much shopping. The reality is that I do a lot of shopping, when calculated at the end of a year, but because it's an item here and an item there without any planned reasoning, I end up with a bunch of random crap that I don't wear, and then I spend a lot of time frustrated with the options ( or lack thereof) in my closet. It's the same frustration I get while playing Words With Friends, when I end up with all vowels and no words to play off of.
Probably ten years ago I began wearing mostly all black. This cut back on the frustration for a while, as I know that no matter what time of year, I have a black shirt or a black sweater that I can wear with jeans and be all set. I stopped trying to be trendy, and just went with basic, and it worked. It works when you travel, it works when you're going out, it works when going to work. It's almost like dressing by number, or Garanimals.
Basic is kind of boring.
But I'm terrible at putting together outfits, and trying to do so makes me anxious. Enter Pinterest.
Turns out all I needed was someone to lay out clothes for me, and upload it to the internet.
You guys, I have most of that crap in my closet. Maybe not every piece, but enough of it that I could get pretty close to most of these outfits, allowing for some minor substitutions. The good news here is that I feel better about my initial vision when I first spot something and decide to buy it. It's getting it home and matching it to something else where I lose confidence in that initial vision, and just hang it up and leave it to gather dust. So maybe my habit of buying individual pieces works after all, sort of.
The more I find these outfits on Pinterest, and find the individual items in my own closet, the more I realize that I do have something of a style. It's a style I like to call "Leawood Boho" mixed with "Hippie Thrifty Mom." Start with a pair of jeans, add a cotton shirt, layer a flowy blouse or a long cardigan sweater, add a bunch of seemingly random but slightly matching cheap jewelry, and either flats or boots. Tada! This, I can do. And I get something of a kick out of actually doing it cheaply, as opposed to the many Leawood moms who drop a lot of cash at places like Standard Style Boutique on outfits that make them look nearly homeless effortless. (There's a difference between "Boho" and "Hobo" but sometimes It's a very thin line.
(Mary Kate Olsen picture from msvixenmag.com, which is not a link I recommend clicking outside of the google image search function unless your pop-up blocker is made of titanium. Just sayin.)
But I digress.
Here's the other thing that's kind of new for me: jewelry. When I had babies, I practically stopped wearing jewelry. Earrings and necklaces are the kind of things babies love to grab a hold of and try to rip off your body in order to put it into their mouths, sometimes forcefully. So I stopped wearing anything except stud earrings, for years. Now that I'm teaching little people I don't have to hold in my lap, however, I notice that all the teachers wear a shit-ton of jewelry, all the time. Big earrings, layered chains of necklaces, tons of bracelets. It's kind of...weird. As always when I don't understand something having to do with women, I asked my mother. "Well, your grandmother was a teacher, and she always said you had to wear shiny things to keep the kids attention."
Aha. It's the "Look! Shiny!" method.
So now I wear a lot of my grandmother's jewelry. None of it has any value, but it's bright and shiny and retro, and goes decently with my Boho taste.
I still wear a lot of black, I still find safety there. But I'm trying to stretch. It's a start, I guess.
*fashionista is a little strong when discussing the Target dollar bin, methinks.
File under: Things they never told me; Things we don't discuss around women of childbearing years.
(Warning: This is not a shiny, happy teaching/education/funny kid stories, share with the guys kind of post. So you can click away now, dad.)
Back in November, I stopped taking my birth control pills. I don't need them anymore for, you know, birth control (see also: husband, snipped), so I guess I was mainly hanging on to them for habit's sake. I always felt like I needed to have that control over my hormones, to force my body to do what I wanted every 28 days. Without that, what my body really wanted to do was have no set cycle schedule and create cysts on my ovaries which grow and explode and HURT, just for fun. In short, the pill kept my body from trying to kill me, and it allowed me to know with certainty that it would be okay to wear white pants.
I found this useful for many years.
But this fall, I decided enough is enough. So I quit taking it.
Meanwhile, and mostly unrelated, the tremors in my hands have been getting worse. My handwriting is horrible, especially if I have to go slowly, or trace something. Not only can I not hold a camera or decorate cookies, I can't tweeze my own eyebrows. I can barely put on makeup, and to do that I have to be leaning over the sink looking into a stationary mirror, I can't hold a compact mirror with one hand and apply mascara with the other. On most days, this is simply annoying. It is also part of the excuse I use for putting on my makeup while driving in the car, at red lights. Mostly.
But back to December. One morning I went into the urgent care clinic at my doctor's office thinking I had a UTI. This is not abnormal, I get bladder infections 2-4 times per year. Who knows why. But this time, I saw a different doctor in the rotation, one I had never seen. One who apparently read my chart, unlike anyone else in that office recently. And so she knocked and came into the little room and sat down and said, "You don't have a bladder infection."
"Oh, yes I do," I countered, because I am That Patient, The One Who Always Knows Better.
"No, actually you don't," she said. "And you haven't really had one since 2009."
"No," I'm still in charge of this conversation, lady. "I get them a couple of times a year. I know what it feels like. I just need an antibiotic."
She cleared her throat.
"Let me be clear. You do not have a UTI. You haven't had one in two years. I've looked through your chart. The last 5 times you've come in here and peed in a cup, it hasn't actually grown any bacteria. So there's no infection." (note: they do a quick pH dip in the office, and then they send it off for a five day culture. Apparently nobody was following up.)
Shut. The. Front. Door.
And so she sent me to see a urologist, for the weird, painful bloating and the having to run to the bathroom suddenly, ALL THE DAMN TIME.
Finally, this week I had a CT scan and a visit with the urologist. (Who, for the record, is younger than me. DO NOT WANT.) He diagnosed me with Overactive Bladder and sent me home with a new prescription.
So. Let's tally it all up, shall we? I gave up the birth control prescription of my youth, and traded it for something to keep me from peeing my pants when I sneeze and running for the bathroom every five minutes. I may, in the near future, also have to start taking a prescription to help me deal with the shaking, for it is driving me crazy. Youthful Bountiful Girl: 0; Shriveled up and Damaged Old Woman: 2. I went straight from preventing a baby to trying to avoid being like one.
A woman's body does strange things, things men don't have to deal with. It's not just the Bringing Forth New Life miracle, either, although I suppose it's connected. Your body never fully recovers from forcing a watermelon through the eye of a needle, and I don't think it matters if you have one or twenty. Things just don't quite fall back into place correctly. Nobody tells you this, when you're young. Nobody tells you, look, that getting up in the night to pee thing? That's not just to prepare you for what it's like having a snuggly little screamer around at 2am. It never goes back. I guess if they did, nobody would want to have children anymore and then we'd die off as a society.
My point is, and I know you've been waiting patiently: 40 Sucks. I hadn't really worried a whole lot about it, it's just another birthday. But now I think turning 40 is like having a car with a 60,000 mile warranty. Once you hit 60,001 things starting falling apart.
I am a Gen-Xer. I was told in college that I would have three, four, maybe five different careers before I retire. I heeded that advice, and indeed, it gave me permission to look for that change. I get stagnant, I get bored, I let my ADHD get the best of me, and then I start looking for ways to move on to the next career. I always ask, What's Next?
It's either that or rearrange my living room again.
Even though it's been three years since I left the recruiting business, I still think like a recruiter. And I have something to say:
Corporate Recruiters are missing the point: the idea that careers are going to jump around, the career coaching that my liberal arts professors kept hitting on, nearly 20 years ago. They want to hire employees who have only had two jobs in ten years, or less, for some, but 5 years at a job seems to be the magic number. Even in technology hubs of California, there are companies who will not hire someone who has had three jobs in five years, who is “a jumper” in recruiting terms. But these companies are getting stagnant themselves, because the people they hire want safety before innovation. They’ve hired brilliant engineers on H1B visas who fear losing their job and being sent home, who literally are not in charge of their own destiny. It is the golden handcuffs. It is a cruel and unusual punishment for wanting a better life and having the IQ and skills to get it. And it is forcing these companies into mediocrity. Innovation means change, it is inherently not safe. There are really very few companies who get this.
I digress. I do that. Oh, look at the kitty!
Look, I’ve done corporate, I’ve done small business, I’ve done non-profit. I've seen it from all sides. Now I’ve made the jump to education, which funny enough, is what I’ve always said I wanted to retire from. When I was 22 I said I want to be teaching when I retire, but who knows what will happen in between. I didn’t really care. I was thinking I’d be teaching Shakespeare's influence on pop-culture at the time, but I’m teaching computer skills to elementary kids, instead. Okay, good enough.
And I love it. I’m teaching technology to the next generation of change agents. But teaching them how to cut and paste in Microsoft Word is, in some ways, doing them a disservice. I feel like I need to be teaching them how to look for change. How to look for and become a master user of the next great thing the digital age spits out. And then to find the next thing. But half the time I have to teach them to just click and see what happens first, they are terrified of making a mistake. They are scared to think. We're working on that.
But still, the world of Education isn’t meant for innovation, either. There’s not enough money to innovate. Change has a lot of red tape, and you can’t test fearlessness.
Then I read a couple of articles about a group of people who are defining change.
Very thought provoking stuff. I've come across some education focused websites which are committed to teaching teachers and students how to innovate, without fear of all that “bad stuff” the internet introduces to our kids (speaking of fear - you should see this next generation of parents. They are ruled by fear. But that's a different post.) Sites like Edmodo, Glogster, Storybird. There are so many more popping up each day, it's breathtaking.
And I am going to teach them to my students - maybe they'll learn how to be fearless in the process. It's not just a career lesson, or a classroom skill. It's a life lesson.
PS - Want some more fun but educational sites you can trust your kids on? Try ABCya, and Kerpoof!
School's out for winter break. Tomorrow we officially move into winter. I have enough candy and chocolate gifts from students to send me into diabetic shock (Thank you for them all.) I have enough wine to get me to Sunday, so I figure I'm all set to make it through Smowmaggedon, should it actually manifest itself.
Merry Christmas. See you on the other side, kids. Here's hoping that 2012 sucks a little bit less for my family, and perhaps even seeing the return of my writing mojo.
I've been writing a lot of posts into the Notes app on my iPhone, but I haven't posted any of them here. One is a Dear John letter to someone who really is named John, a very raw letter that is mostly about the rage, confusion and sadness that I can't seem to get over from a situation he had no control over. But he probably doesn't want to hear it. And most of the others are just bitching, venting, trivial little annoyances, First World Problems that I don't think anyone wants to hear about. The reality is my life is pretty damn good, and I forget that day to day, when the dog pukes in the kitchen, or I have a cold I can't shake even after two rounds of antibiotics, or my youngest son climbs a tree in the wilderness behind the neighbor's backyard and emerges covered in poison ivy.
Maybe if I'd been really good at still posting here all along, even the little things, instead of telling those stories to Twitter or Facebook, it wouldn't feel so fake to pull up typepad and try to put together a post. It wouldn't feel like so much effort to write something of substance. But it does.
2011 has been a banner year in my house, if by banner you mean truly weird and kind of schitzophrenic. We've had really big highs, really hard lows, and a range of emotional tugging that would send even the most stoic of personalities into therapy. And I, as you know, am not the most stable person you've ever met. And therapy isn't covered by insurance, don't EVEN get me started.
My job, which I adore, is only stressful in that the hours are inflexible, and adjusting to that has been harder than I thought. After 10 years of having Fridays off and the ability to float early for doctor appointments and long lunches, now I'm 8:15-4, and to arrange to be gone from work requires getting a substitute to cover me. If you know me at all you know that I generally find it much easier to do things myself than to explain it to someone else, and the thought of someone coming into my space and messing up what I've been working on sends this control freak into a tailspin. So I don't do it, unless I really have to. The measure of what causes me to miss work has been raised exponentially.
Perhaps that all would have been easier had my husband's job not taken him four states away Monday through Friday, leaving me mostly to single parent, and to beg and bother friends for carpools and favors that I really can't repay right now. But this is the hand we were dealt.
No, this is the hand we took, actually. As someone used to say, we bought our ticket, we knew what we were getting into. I try not to complain about that because I sent him off, knowing it was for the benefit of our little family overall. But we may have overestimated our stamina for it.
I'm reaching a point of meltdown, but I'm trying to keep my head down and just keep moving. It's like I'm running a marathon I was unprepared for, but I'm determined to finish. I don't know what shape I'll be in at the end.
Or maybe the problem is that there's no end in sight. If I could see the end, I could know that I could get there, pace myself correctly, dig deep only when I really have to. But I find myself digging deep just to get out bed in the morning, too many mornings.
I have friends I want to see, spend some time with over lunch or drinks or coffee, but there's always something else within my own house keeping me from taking that time for myself. I'd like to get to a yoga class, but there's too many soccer practices or trumpet lessons or frankly, I'm just too damn tired on the nights we have no activities to even stretch out into some yoga positions on my own bedroom floor, and I fall into bed, literally, every night. I've never been so tired.
I've gained ten pounds. I snack all the time. I feel like I need fuel to push through this. I've never been an emotional eater, I was always someone who stopped eating when stressed this heavily, and yet I can't keep my hands out of the kid's snacks in the pantry. And yet my body isn't moving enough burn the calories needed to keep up wtih the intake, because I'm so tired. It's a catch-22 I don't know how I fell into. Or how to get out. My metabolism came to a screeching halt a few years ago, and I knew it then but had the flexibility to make that a priority. Now, like I said, I'm just trying to push through. Apparently by puishing down 3000 calories a day.
Today and tomorrow I don't have to work, school is out. As a para instead of a fully certified teacher, I'm not required to be there - pretty much anytime the kids are off, I'm off. So I had some time to take a bath this morning, and go to Costco leisurely, and run some laundry without feeling like I was gonna fall over into the basket snoring. Halloween is Monday, Thanksgiving is a month away, and Christmas break just a few weeks after that.
I can do this. But maybe I need to let myself vent a little more, regardless of whether anyone cares to hear it.
Today in the car I heard these three songs, in this order, and then I felt better.
"Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.."
"And I want to thank you, for giving me the best day of my life."
The song just makes me happy. Granted it reminds me of someone who's no longer here, someone who should be. Someone who gave in to the demons, who forgot what this song was all about.
"Never give in. Never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." ~ Winston Churchill
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