Cheerful Abundance

If you have been following along this sad excuse for a blog, you know that I quit grad school, quit academia, and decided to take a year off to do some Good Works and maybe write a book. I blew up my life, and I have to say, the funniest (and funnest) part of this is how many other women I meet in my age bracket who are doing the same, or who aren’t, but really, really want to. It is like joining a secret sorority,  whose members are only recognizable to each other.  The other day I had coffee with a neighbour after bus drop off, and we were talking about how the life we have now, while much loved, isn’t the life we necessarily pictured for ourselves, a story I hear from a lot of my female friends. Its funny, this middle-age business, especially for women, how hitting that peri-menopausal window starts the reflection process, and how that reflection becomes realized (or avoided) in one’s life.

For me, I want to throw more parties, do more higher-level charity work, and write. Maybe start a rock band of like-minded women, and secretly rock out in the garage. I bet Lilly Pulitzer would do an electric guitar, if we asked. They’ve done bikes and jeeps; how hard could it be? Take up golf, again. Travel. Live a life with less stuff, and more experiences.

This weekend, an old friend died, completely unexpectedly. She was 41 years old, and I don’t even know what to say about it except that the last time we saw each other in person was just before the holidays, because, you know, so busy, and all. But I was just about to email her and set up a lunch date when I got the news, and now I can’t quite process the here/not here part of this situation. I don’t have some happy wrap up to this, or a great epiphany, or a fun dog story. I think the winter crushed me a bit this year, and I need some sustained sunlight and a warm wind to blow the blues away.

It snowed again last night, and now we have about a foot and half of snow on the ground, drifting up over three feet everywhere I have to actually shovel. My husband, who is a blessed saint, bundled the kids up in winterwear, a half hour process that always includes giggling, crying, a fist fight, a reconciliation, and a dance, and took them to the park, to slide in the snow and generally burn off some of their restless energy before we all went crazy with Housebound Psychosis and killed each other. Now I think he is trying to bore them into taking accidental naps, a ninja parenting skill that I heartily endorse, while I get started on making Kielbasa, Kale,and Tortellini soup. I first had this at a friend’s house for lunch, and although I was there to conduct Adult Lady Business and plow through a pile of charity work, it was all I could do to keep from making those little happy mouth sounds kids make when they are eating something that they love. Our gracious hostess shared the recipe, and in my house we refer to it as her soup, and it is heaven on a cold day, with crusty bread.

This snow and cold makes me crave carbohydrates. I could eat an entire loaf of bread right now, preferably while lying in bed under 8 duvets, in between naps. This is winter in the Midwest, and I am done with it, mentally. My online shopping keeps turning to pretty things in pastel shades, impossibly thin cotton cardigans with embroidery around the cuffs and buttons shaped like seashells, cabochon earrings in palest blue. Playing with the Jack Rogers colour picker and designing sandals. Researching summer rentals on faraway beaches.

I am going to try to blog every day in February, however, that obviously doesn’t mean blogging well, or saying anything worth reading! Sorry, Internet: let’s pick this up tomorrow. I will try to have a fabulous adventure between now and then to write about. Or make the kids do something cute and/or funny. Or poke something with a stick.

first time in snow pants!

This upcoming week is the last week before winter break, so I have to cram a lot of stuff into it, because I pretty much get nothing done when the kids are home, since they always want to do fun things and my willpower is pretty weak and I mostly only want to do fun things, too. They are my enablers! So this week is my go-to week, to finish the Xmas shopping, bake some cookies, make sure we have ingredients for Xmas dinner and random cocktail nights, and chacuterie for when I don’t want to cook, and enough Ginger Ale and gingerbread to choke a reindeer. Plus all the external stuff: meetings at the kids’ school, plus a room mom event where I get to lead a class in a craft, only I can’t figure out from the emails which kid’s class it is that I am supposed to be all help-y in. I also need to get a top-to-bottom housecleaning in, get some charity stuff off my docket, and send out the last few Xmas cards. Does it sound like I am complaining? I am not. Because this is the first year that I can just do all of this stuff, without wedging it in between 60 hours of work a week. The first year I can make gingerbread in the middle of the afternoon, or watch a trashy movie while I fold laundry and clean my room, without guilt. This leaning out stuff is great.

Of course, I haven’t written a word, but that is for January. I will start that in January, that writing thing, right?

Right now, I am enjoying the tail end of a relaxing weekend. I have a little girl tucked up in my bed, watching TV, and once every hour or so she wanders out to find me to tell me how sick she is, and I get her juice and make a fuss and tuck her back in, and she is happy. Her sister got to go to the grocery store with Daddy, just the two of them, for ginger ale and popsicles, and is quite chuffed with herself. I cleaned out the fridge (like a superhero) and made a meatloaf for dinner. Yesterday, a friend stopped by, and instead of plowing through all the volunteer work we were supposed to be meeting about, we ended up  sitting around drinking coffee, eating banana bread, and chatting, while my husband and kids shoveled snow. We got so much snow yesterday, and finally had a reason to bust out the kids’ snowpants. It was the first time they have ever worn snowpants, and they were mightily impressed, although in true ‘my life is all cliché’ fashion, everyone had to pee the second we wrestled them into their snow gear. Its been the perfect weekend, and the model for our winter break: reading, naps, playing outside, meeting up with friends, and eating. Simple life, happy wife.

Every couple of months, I go template-crazy, and start experimenting. This is one of those times. Please excuse the mess of my site over the next few days. More to come …. xoxox

Last night at midnight, my phone beeped; my calendar, reminding me of the day. But I didn’t need the reminder. Today is our fireversary: the anniversary of the day an (alleged) arsonist set our home on fire, because he (allegedly) felt that we weren’t paying him enough attention, him and his poor-me problems. He set up a lot of drama in his life, our (alleged) arsonist, escalating his efforts exponentially after his wife finally gave up and left him to his own devices.

It was dark and it was cold, and it was late. I had been in an evening class, with my phone off, and 2 blocks from my house all I could think about was how badly I wanted to go home, get into my pajamas, and make some hot chocolate. Maybe watch the Daily Show. I could smell the smoke, and assumed it was from fireplaces, fired up against the bitter night. That is what I was thinking about, when my husband darted out in front of my car, two blocks from the house. He didn’t want me to turn the corner, to see the firetrucks outside, my garden in ruins, the gawkers standing around in the cold, the company waiting to start the board-up.

He had arrived home from work hours earlier, early enough to smell the smoke when he stepped off the bus, to see the flames shooting out of the windows. Early enough to stand on the lawn and watch his house burn, his dog and both cats inside. He wanted to spare me that experience.

We were just a few weeks away from becoming first time parents, and in a gesture of faith that our adoption would go smoothly, had just started to set up the nursery. Stuffed animals, toys, armloads of clothes – all covered in soot, and smoke, and creosote. We were happy – really happy, in all the best and most intangible ways. I was a few weeks away from starting parental leave, we were a few weeks away from celebrating our last Christmas without children, we were looking forward to a booze-soaked, relaxing holiday season, while we prepared for our trip to Ethiopia to meet and bring home our children.

But while we were upstairs, working hard on the whole ‘having a great life’ thing, by holding down jobs, making plans for the future, working hard and being responsible adults, downstairs, two floors below, our (alleged) arsonist was feeling deeply sorry for himself. Why wasn’t the world according him the kind of attention he felt he deserved, despite the fact that he did nothing on this planet with his life that in any way contributed even the meager-est amount of good? How could he get more attention? And then it (allegedly) came to him. He (allegedly) snuck out to the hallway and removed the batteries from all the public smoke detectors. He (allegedly) filled half empty paint cans with paint thinner, and then he (allegedly) dumped boxes of nails, bullets, and carpenter staples inside of them, (allegedly) making bombs. He (allegedly) covered all of his living room furniture with accelerant, and then he (allegedly) positioned himself at his own back door, so that he could (allegedly) make a dramatic escape.

Our plan to have a leisurely 4 weeks in which to prepare for our trip to Africa, and to savour the last month of no-kids living was gone, obviously. The aftermath of a fire is a mess: not just the cleaning up part,but the back-and-forth with our insurance company, the constant repairmen, visiting and scheduling and waiting for repairmen, the smell. Oh, the smell! Every single thing we owned had a patina of creosote on it, and smelled like smoke. Every thing we had bought for our babies smelled like death and fear and the bitter aftertaste of fried electrical wiring.

It is all alleged, because even though the firemen saw clear signs of a deliberate fire, including accelerant lines on the walls and furniture, the city doesn’t pursue arson because it is so hard to prove. Unless someone had seen our (alleged) arsonist in the act, they wouldn’t spend the money to go to court, and he walked away free from his actions. He got what he wanted. As members of the condo board, we stood in his unit the next day (that is his place, in the picture above), and saw the streak-marks where something flammable had caught first, leaving charred sunburst patterns on three walls. We saw the aftermath of his paint-can bombs, set up so that the fire, when traveling to the 2 units above him, would have trapped us in the back of our apartment, a wall of fire between us and any of our exit doors.

We also, to add insult to injury, saw our mail in the rubble of his place – packages and letters that he had been pilfering from our mailbox, a large communal bin for packages too big to fit in the letter slots in the lobby. A package of clothes that I had ordered was in the bedroom, ripped apart. Ladies Christmas pajamas, and a bathrobe, a packing slip with my name on it, stolen by a man who lived alone and thought the world owed him something, and that he could take whatever he wanted to take.

I harboured a lot of anger about what happened that day, and what happened in the days following: the insurance company that let us down, the legal system that let us down, the insane amount of extra stress we carried at a time when our only focus should have been on our impending parenthood, the way we lived with the smell for months and months, surrounded by loud air cleaners that cleaned nothing at all, how our plans to sell our place that spring were ruined, because nobody buys a unit after a fire. Not for anything close to market value, at any rate.

But I can’t let him win. I can’t let our (alleged) arsonist, possibly the biggest waste of human life and effort I have ever had the misfortune of knowing, win. And that anger was a form of attention for him, even if he isn’t around any more to feel it. So on Fireversary, we celebrate our own win. I won a family – a husband who is the kind of man that would stand out in the bitter cold of a miserable November night six years ago, and wait for my car to drive by, just to save me the pain he himself had just experienced, of driving up and seeing the horror, alone. Two children who make every day a blessing, who light the world with their humour and their kindness and their ridiculous shenanigans. I live in a warm, cozy bungalow, in a lovely town, with my wonderfully flawed and perfect family, where we play endless games of Candyland, eat cookies, read books, and enjoy each other’s company. And somewhere out there, out in the bitter cold, is a sad little middle-aged man that nobody loves, that nobody would ever give a second thought to. A man that contributes nothing of worth to the world, that is as useless in thought and action as a person can be, a pathetic, puling little shell of a human being.

I win.

Today, we played games as we hid in the basement against a huge wave of storms that battered the state. We watched TV, snuggled, took naps, played music, danced, and when the eye of the storms went over us, ran out and played in the puddles, jumping until we were soaking wet, then running back inside, to a warm bath.

Today, we ate dinner as a family around the dining room table, the kids in their flannel pajamas, cozy after a warm bath. We had a hearty kielbasa, bean, and tortellini soup, with crusty garlic bread, told jokes, and we talked about the week ahead, and the kids begged for gum (NO!) and then they wiped down the steam that had collected on our front windows while the soup had cooked. We poured them into bed, overtired and ready to sleep, and now I am off to watch a little TV with my husband, and maybe have a little hot chocolate. We spent the day happy, healthy, warm, and laughing.

You can’t burn this down, is what I wish I could say to him, our (alleged) arsonist.  You might be able to light a match, but at the end of the day, you can’t burn us down.

A few weeks ago, I started reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean in”, a charming tome that blames educated white women and their poor workplace choices for being the reason that women make 77 cents on the dollar to men and are not advancing up the corporate ladder. Who knew women had the kind of corporate agency required to make it impossible for women to advance in great numbers in the workplace. All. Their. Own.Fault. For not leaning in. Oh, that wasn’t your take on it? Because it was definitely mine.

I didn’t finish the book, of course, before it was due back at the library, because I work a 60+ hour a week job, and the big joke about what I do is how flexible my career path is, because I get to choose which 60 to 70 hours I work each week. I am not complaining though: I chose an academic life, and I chose it thoughtfully and with care. And it turns out, I am good at it. Good at engaging college students in the classroom, good at using The Bachelor and other horrific pop-culture media to teach tricky theoretical concepts, and good at coming up with ideas. But I am not good at office politics, especially the byzantine grudge-holding and secrecy that permeates academia, and I am not good at hearing that I can’t voice an opinion in my field until after I am tenured.At the same time, I was becoming increasingly good at talents I never wanted to cultivate. Talents like, being so filled with anxiety that I could no longer open my work email without taking a Xanax first, and moving so far past the point of anger in my day-to-day life that the only thing left in my emotional toolkit was indifference. And what is so weird is that when I was at my most anxious, most stressed out, most emotionally bankrupt point, I won an award, got an amazing set of course reviews from my students, had 3 papers accepted at conferences. But I felt like I was drowning, and it was abundantly clear that my department was fresh out of life preservers.

So I quit.I just quit last week.

It is weird to quit something that you wanted so badly. I really wanted the academic life, at least the romantic version of it. I don’t exactly know what the fallout is going to be. I know I most likely won’t finish my PhD now, and that stings, but as I settle farther into this decision, I keep reminding myself that that is a pretty ‘first-world’ problem. Poor me, gentle reader, I didn’t get to finish my PhD. Poor ME! And I have to keep reminding myself that out here, in the real world that I feel like I have rejoined, pretty much nobody else has a PhD, either, and yet are somehow managing to live happy, productive lives.

I don’t have another job. I am not even looking, to be honest. I told my husband I wanted some time: time to let the anxiety leak out of me, time to read novels again, time to play with my kids without always running that academic voice in the back of my head that reminded me that any time spent away from the computer was automatically considered wasted time. Time with my children felt like wasted time, time I couldn’t get back, time I was losing, making me fall behind at work. It is crazy, so crazy to me, how that felt.  So now, I am taking time. Time to clean my house, cook some decent meals, volunteer a bit, time to breathe, time to be in the moment with my children, relaxed and happy.

Time to regroup. Time to just be still and silent, let the world pass by for a little while, and forget about me. And time to read.

The dirty secret of academia is that you don’t get to read. Or rather, you get to read constantly, but it is all journal articles and scholarly books, and you aren’t supposed to read for pleasure, and if you dared to, you certainly should never, ever admit it. A few years ago, I had a conversation with another graduate student about our summers, and I trusted her enough to tell her that, over the summer, while I still worked like crazy and wrote like crazy, I snuck in the time to read two popular novels. Two! I could never have told anyone else I worked with. They would have labelled me as lacking ambition. And then she whispered to me – whispered, like it had to be a secret – that she had read the entire Hunger Games Trilogy. And loved it. Three young adult books in 3 months? Not really allowed. Because if you think you have time to read, well, let’s face it, you also have an enormous pile of journal articles and french social theorists to plow through. So now, I am reading: light fiction, literary fiction, good biographies, trashy celebrity autobiographies, everything. Reading, and (whispers) writing.

All of my life I have been pursuing careers I didn’t necessarily want, as a means of creating a buffer between myself and what I really wanted to do in life, and my resume is as crazy as it gets with regard to career changes. I paid the bills, kept the lights on, worked in a number of completely disparate fields, and told myself I was being a responsible adult, but I have to say, that path feels less and less like responsibility, and more and more like lying to myself. Being good at something is not enough of a reason to do it, I have recently realized. And being happy is completely important.  No doubt I am being falsely swayed by the plethora of bad life-coach inspired self-affirmation quotations that show up on my Pinterest dashboard, but what is life for, if not making extravagant mistakes and being an epic failure, in the pursuit of your dreams?

I love my dreams. So why haven’t I been pursuing them?

I am giving myself a year. A year to put my mental house back in order, to stop stress-eating crap in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep, to stop pursuing everything career-wise that I don’t want, and to finally be honest and just admit to myself that all I really want to do in life is play with my kids, bake, read, and write, and that is perfectly okay. A year to Lean Out, a year to write without pressure, a year to lower my blood pressure and my cholesterol and golf and clean and have a completely unstressful Christmas and learn to knit and hopefully publish something and bake things and be happy. I just checked the latest Tori Spelling memoir out of the library. I made hors d’ouevres for my husband and I to snack on after the kids go to bed tonight, so that we can have cocktails, snack, and watch a movie. After I finish writing this, I am going to make some homemade macaroni and cheese for the kids, revel in the domestic life a bit, and then read until they get home. It feels good. I feel guilty, still, about it, but hopefully that will fade.

That’s enough feels for one day, I think. Time to slip back into my unfeeling robot-like Episcopalian skinsuit and go dust some baseboards. Here is Danny Trejo, to read us out.

Some photos require more explanation than others, as do some marriages. Last Spring, my husband and I discovered that we were both trying to get a baker to make a “Happy Anniversary/Birthday, Asshole” cake for each other, to no avail. It is this stupid in-joke we have, that originated with freaking out over our Christmas cards one year, and now shows up randomly on holidays that are especially stressful, a way for one of us to remind the other to stop taking it all so seriously and just relax. Sadly, it turned out that not one baker in this whole town would write the word Asshole on a cake, so we were left cakeless.

My husband never swears, which makes it even funnier for me that he tried to get that iced on pastry. But even though he never curses, he can appreciate a good punchline, which is why he loves The Bloggess’ story about Beyoncé so much. I can’t remember when I read it originally, but I do know when he read it – on my Nook, after a long, irritating day, when I loaded The Bloggess’ site up in my Nook browser and handed it over, to give him the laugh he so desperately needed. That story, about that chicken, is my happy place; the place I go to in my head at the dentist, or when another Mom starts telling me how gifted her kids are. “Knock, knock, motherfucker” is a phrase I hear in the back of my head whenever I am confronted with the absurdity of suburban life.

So now we are here, the part of the story where you are wondering what on earth these two anecdotes have to do with one another. Where might the intersection might be between our troubling attempts to add pastry-based expletives to our marital communication toolkit and the Bloggess’ giant chicken? Well, I tell you … it has been a rough summer, one that culminated in me having to act like an adult, make some hard decisions, give up some dreams, and put my childrens’ needs ahead of my own, and it’s good, I guess, but charting a new course in life is never easy, which is why I was so grateful to see the delivery van for the best bakery in town stop in front of my house one morning, clearly sent by my husband. My husband who finally found a baker who works in expletives, apparently, because in that lovely bakery box was this:

Some days, when it feels like the whole world was designed just to punish you for having the nerve to get out of bed, there isn’t much that another person can do that can comfort you. Except to have delivered to you a delicious cake with a chicken iced onto it, along with the words, “Knock, knock, Motherfucker!” We hid it from the kids, who are learning to sound out words, and it took us a week to eat, and I think it might be the best cake I have ever had. Knock, knock, Motherfucker, indeed.

As usual, I am all out of order here, writing about things after they happen, but I loved doing this tie-dye project with the kids so much that I wanted to make a note of it, so that we can do it again.

I haven’t actually tie-dyed anything in years, but back in my faux-hipster, super-ironic youth, I used to steal oxford cloth button down shirts from whoever I was dating at the time, and those horrible Lacoste golf shirts, usually in pink or white (I dated a lot of preppy boys. A LOT), and then tie-dye them fuchsia and navy and turquoise, and wear them to the dive-bar I bartended at to cover my college tuition.  Back then, tie-dye required buckets, loads of that cheap RIT dye from the grocery store, and a ridiculous amount of effort, and they dyes always ran when the shirts were washed, but it is so much easier now! I suspect that back then I was thinking what I was doing was some kind of awesome anti-consumerist statement, but I can’t lie, a lot of the appeal was the horrified looks people would give me when they realized I was tie-dying perfectly good $100 shirts. Ah, youth, I don’t miss you as much as the media tells me I should.

Anyway, setting aside the ridiculousness of my young adult foibles, I love doing very big, very messy projects with the kids, and they needed some long-sleeved t-shirts for school anyway, and we had some white short-sleeved t-shirts left over from another project, and I thought it might be fun to do pillowcases as well, so we did, and it turned out awesome, and here is the how and the why of it, for next time:

Step 1: materials. I bought Tulip brand dye in ‘Moody Blue’, tie dye soda ash dye fixer, and Synthapol laundry soap. If you are following along, these are links to Amazon ***, but don’t buy any of this there – it was much cheaper at my local craft store, all of it. I bought the soda ash and Synthapol because the kids did tie-dye at summer camp, and after two washes, those shirts are faded and muddy, and I wanted our projects to look really good now and 50 washes from now.

Step 2: The Tying. My husband and I tied the long-sleeved t-shirts ahead of time, and the pillowcases. There are lots of instructions online for this, but we mostly gathered fabric up into bullseyes, and then tied them several times, then tied the whole t-shirt up into a lumpy thing. The kids could not work the elastics by themselves, so they pointed to what they wanted tied off, and we did it for them.

Step 3: Soak the tied garments in a water/soda ash bath. Proportions are on the container, but one bag of that stuff would do at least 3 tie dye sessions.

Step 4: dress your children in your husband’s old punk rock show t-shirts, turned inside out so as not to traumatize them with the graphics and/or not to ruin the shirts. The dye goes everywhere, and an apron would not have been enough. We did this outside, on a mesh metal table over the grass so that it wouldn’t matter where the dye spilled.

Step 5: The Tulip dye kit is great because the dyes are pre-measured into squeeze bottles – just add water and squirt away! I loved this part, because it was so easy to let the kids play with the dye, without worrying about dipping the shirts into a dye solution, and because it made it very easy for them to handle the dye alone, without me hovering. And we bought a colour kit with just three complimentary colours in it, so that no matter what colours they chose, it would go well together.

Step 6: Really, this is just a cautionary tale step. Learn from my mistakes, and make your kids wear gloves. Especially when school starts just a few days after your ‘dye day’. Luckily, we picked our new school colours for this project!

Step 7: Once the fabric is dyed, toss each item into a plastic grocery bag, and tie the top to seal the bag. Let it sit for 24 hours, to let the dyes really saturate the fabric, and become very rich and deep.

Step 8: One at a time, drop the items in a sink, and rinse with cold water until the water runs clear. Cut the ties off, and rinse the whole garment again, in warm water. Admire your handiwork – the 24 hour ‘rest’ really makes for amazing colour saturation. I had to use a filter to get the full effect, but this is exactly what it looked like coming out of the bag. That’s good, because getting all those stupid bands off will make you hate crafting, projects, and your life choices.

Step 9: wash everything in the washer, on the hottest water you can, using Synthropol detergent. Dry as normal. I was extra cautious, and did a second rinse wash cycle and washed a load of dark towels directly afterward, to make sure no dye was left in my machine.

I made this! And I kind of love it. The photos don’t do it justice, because I am a crap photographer, but my daughter loves it, and her sister, who got a Dad-made matching shirt, is equally thrilled. But not as thrilled as they are with the shirts they did themselves.

Step 10: Wear your new creation to kindergarten orientation. Be adorable in it, and super-proud that you made it yourself.

They actually made those t-shirts all by themselves, minus the washing machine part, the soda ash part, and the actual elastic tying. The design, the colours, all them. And they love these shirts, and the pride is so adorable. I think we are going to tie dye a set of sheets for them next, because I am so tired of pulling white sheets out of the laundry and trying to figure out what bed size they are. And because it would be a great foil for their ‘edging toward Pottery Barn’ room decor.

The difference between these shirts, and the ones they did at camp are staggering, in terms of colour-fastness, and saturation. The soda ash and Synthropol really make a difference. This was so fun that I want to buy a bigger kit and maybe make their birthday party next year a tie-dye party with a bunch of their friends. My husband has a lot of ancient punk rock t-shirts, and the back lawn is half dead anyway. Win-win!

Promotional Disclosure

*** ed note: These links go to Amazon, because Amazon is the most stable in terms of being able to click these a year later and still bring up the right product, but – they are not affiliate links, and also, if you are going to do this project yourself, look at the products and then go to a local art supply store, because the soda ash and Synthrapol were each a third the price of the Amazon list prices. Also, this post is not sponsored in any way by Tulip. I bought the dyes because I wanted to try them,and I really like them.

A few days ago, I casually mentioned to my husband that I was going to swing by the library to return a few things, and he invited himself along, and offered to buy me lunch afterward.

Isn’t he the worst!

We threw our stuff in the car, and off we went to the library, and all was fine, until he turned to me while we were waiting at a red light, and asked me what book I was returning. I immediately answered that he was looking particularly handsome that morning, and honey, have you lost weight, but he was having none of my tricks, and pressed for the title.

It’s called Eat That Frog, I told him, and the title was enough to prompt him to ask what it was about. “Oh, it’s about procrastination,” I answered airily, hoping he would drop it. He wouldn’t drop it, and asked how I enjoyed it.

Reader, I never read it. Not only did I not read it, but I was returning it late. Two weeks late. Even after I recognized that I had already forgotten to return it on time, I still neither read it, nor returned it. For two more weeks! The fine I paid was equivalent to the cost of the book, on Amazon. And when I told my husband this – that the book was more than two weeks overdue, I never got around to reading it, and that it was about conquering procrastination, well, gentle reader, he had to pull the car over, he was laughing so hard. At me. He was laughing so hard at me, that he had to pull the car over.

If you need me, I will be sitting by the phone, waiting for the nice people at the MacArthur foundation to call with news of my impending genius grant.

So, about two months ago, I posted about how I had this big real-life project going on that I was avoiding like crazy. Because I was avoiding it, I wasn’t really getting anything else done, either – this stupid big project is like a clog in my productivity drain, and if I don’t clear it away, my to-do list is just going to keep stacking up. So I was all, Time to EAT MY FROG. I ordered the book from the library, excited to follow all of its instructions and stop being a stupid procrastinator,  and when it came in, I picked it up, and …. didn’t read it. Not only haven’t I eaten my damned frog yet, I haven’t even finished the book yet, which was due back yesterday, so now, yes, gentle reader, I am paying overdue fees on a book about conquering procrastination. Because I am a genius.

Do you ever just feel stuck? I felt so stuck in the past month, blocked by a work project I am too afraid to start, mired in a real estate sale from hell, and living in our new house, which is only half set up, despite moving in 10 months ago. Is there anything more depressing than going to bed in a room surrounded by baskets of clean laundry that has no place to be put away to, and a pile of boxes, still unpacked, in the corner, and dressers that you can’t hardly dust because you keep piling all the stuff you need to keep track of on top of them? Depressing. Circumstances, depressing, surroundings, depressing.

But not as depressing as the sale of our old house. Or, more accurately, the former-sale of our former house, because, after making us all wait two long months, the buyer’s bank, the same bank that issued their preapproval letter, said, “No. No mortgage for you! And no reason why, either.” This is why we can’t have nice things, America. Because even though the amount was low, the buyer’s credit exemplary, and the apartment being perfection, the bank decided that they don’t like condo mortgages, and off they went. And back on the market we went, again, just yesterday.

So, poor, First World Problems Me. But even while I can recognize how lucky I truly am, it doesn’t change the fact that the sale falling through, and the highs and lows that got us to the fall, coupled with issues at work, and the clutter of our new place, poorly set up, started to weigh on me, to the extent that the only logical thing to do felt like maybe just curling up in a ball in the middle of my bed and not moving, for oh, say, a few months. A season of motionlessness, just letting the time pass uncounted over me while I thought about nothing.

But you know, two kids, can’t indulge in that, have to find a way to suck it up, all British stiff-upper-lip like, so instead, to start taking away the imaginary weight holding me down on the bed, my husband and I did a huge, master to-do list of everything that we need to do this summer, and every thing that needed to be done in this house to get it to ‘finished’. Or rather, ‘finished, except those two storage rooms in the basement that we can close the doors to and worry about later’. The list is two pages long, and we just put our heads down and ploughed through it, hanging shelves, unpacking a few of the last boxes hanging around the living room, sorting books, and cleaning. Because this is what I know about situational depression: it feeds off of chaos, mess, and dirt. I can’t start feeling better until the exterior of my life looks better, and now it does. I feel like crap, but I feel like crap while hiding under a pretty new duvet cover, in a very clean bedroom, and that helps.

Plus, we made a LIST, and how sexy is that, making a list, and checking things off.

So that lifted the weight of the messy house off of me, but I was still trapped under the ‘we need to sell this condo last month’ weight, which I am fixing online by alternating between looking up dream properties to buy in coastal towns, preferably waterfront, and watching videos on YouTube where women let their men give them a makeover. “It’s a process, baby,” and really, truer words never spoken, amirite?

I kind of love Jenna Marbles’ videos. I like pretty girls who laugh at themselves.

I don’t have a nice, tidy ending for this shamble of a ramble. I still didn’t eat my frog, I still feel a little overwhelmed into paralysis, but I am working on moving through it, kicking until I can find the sandbar under my feet, trying not to sink too deep.