Being a Sentient Door…

Hip abduction. Hip abduction. If you stare at those two words for long enough, (1) you start wondering why someone would try to abduct a hip, and (2) you manage to stop crying in the gym, because that is not one of the appropriate crying places in the universe. Try it. It works.

When I finally went to bed last night (and one of the benefits of two nights of not really sleeping is that I’m exhausted tonight), I set my alarm thinking that my two teenagers could get their butts out of bed without my help. I’m not sure why I thought that. It really doesn’t make any sense at all. I think I was abdicating my Momly duties, but I didn’t really warn them of that at 2 AM, so it wasn’t really fair. Usually, one of them does wake up without my help, and she probably would have woken the other kid up, but she failed at it yesterday, so you’d think the Mom part of my brain would have kicked in and said, eh…better set your alarm early. Nope. It didn’t. It was a Mom Fail. So I woke up at 6:56, realized no one was up, and that they had to leave in 4 minutes. Yup. Boychild actually made it one minute late…girlchild needed to shower for soccer photos, so she missed 20 minutes, and yes, yes, I lied and called attendance and said she had a doctor’s appointment. I am a horrible mother.

Now, as I’m driving her to school, I’m sitting in my road’s driveway, waiting for the traffic to clear so I can turn, and who drives by? Her dad. My ex. Oops. He waved a hand, but then at the bottom of the hill, gave us a stare…knowing that we were running late. Anyway. So alarm clocks don’t always go off, especially if you roll over on them and put them on permanent snooze. I suggested using her real alarm clock as a backup (that’s what I do), but there were multiple arguments as to why that would indicate the end of the world. Some arguments I just don’t have the strength to commit to because they really aren’t that important and she will figure it out when she goes to college and mom isn’t there to pull her out of bed when her alarm doesn’t go off.

So I didn’t get enough sleep. I was going to go to the gym in the morning, but my brain was completely frazzled and I would have had to leave at 7 and it was already past then, so I just…hell, I don’t know what I did. I had the dentist at 10. Oh, I remember. I cleaned…I have all these clothes that don’t fit me any more, and I can’t even find the clothes that DO fit me…I’m constantly rummaging through piles trying to find something that won’t fall off, so I bagged up all the big fat clothes and put them in the entryway for the thrift shop. I also went through a couple of drawers and tossed stuff that I never wear, so I’d actually have ROOM for the stuff that does fit. I found homes for most of the bed linens…not sure what to do with a really old, beat-up down comforter…don’t feel like I can throw it away…what if the apocalypse happens and it gets really really cold? I’ll wish I had it then.

I know. You can hear packrat (subHoarder) from way over there. I know my issues.

Then I went to the dentist and to pick up meds and then came home and made my dinner for tonight (and 5 other nights). Well, I prepped it anyway. And I washed all the dishes and tried to clean up the kitchen (a never-ending battle of monstrous proportions) and deal with some art-related stuff. (Is the journal done? No, it’s not. Shut up.) One of my groups has three shows opening in the next 30 days, so it’s a little chaotic with announcements etc. at the moment, and since I’m on the publicity committee and in charge of Facebook and the blog, I need to get my act together. I did find all the photos and resized them all. Tomorrow, I’ll write the first post and do something about the Facebook page.

I did distract my depressoid self by looking at art websites for a while. Like an hour (time suck). Sigh. I get in a bad mood with no art. I get in a bad mood with not enough time. I get in a bad mood with too much stress. I get in a bad mood when the dentist makes me fill out a health form and I check off recent weight loss and then the hygienist wants to know what I did to lose the weight. I got depressed. I am having a shitty time of it. I really don’t want to talk about it. No, I don’t recommend my weight-loss method. Now stop talking to me about reality television and clean my teeth. OK. So today was maybe not the best day to interact with the public, I’m thinking.

Meanwhile, no art was happening. None. Nada. Nichts. This sucks. Day 2 of sucks. I think that’s why my mood is sinking faster than a holey submarine. (Holy Holey Submarine, Batman! OK, enough with the Robin exclamations.) I can’t seem to get a moment for anything right now. After I picked the girlchild up from school, I had time to eat lunch and then took her to her soccer game; I graded at the game and I sewed some too. The game itself was pretty boring…

I think the final score was 7-1 for us…the high school is the one most of my former students go to…I don’t recognize the players. They’re too small and too far away. Plus I forget what lots of them look like once they’re gone. Sad but true. Maybe if they weren’t all wearing uniforms with ponytails…I did recognize some of the kids in the audience.

This is what it looks like when girlchild heads the ball.

I wasn’t doing a good job of photography tonight. The sun was in my eyes. But you can tell she headed it because (1) everyone is looking up and (2) her ponytail is flipped up over her head.

Because the game was such an uneven match, the coach played half of them in the first half, and told them they had to make 200 passes. Girlchild’s group made 220 passes; the other half made 207 passes, or something like that. Because that’s really crucial information. As the watching public, we knew something was going on, but we had theories like the girls had to pass it to one of the girls in the back every third pass (because that’s what it looked like they were doing) and that they shouldn’t pass it to the forwards at all. Anyway. Damn boring game.

Thursday’s should be more exciting…they’ll be playing some of her club teammates…plus it’s a better team (not hard). The problem with my former students’ team is that the kids who are the best players usually have the worst grades. We could motivate them to bring their grades up during soccer season so they could play, but when they get to high school, they have to have a decent grade point average, and many of them just can’t do that. Plus the kids who are better students usually go to one of the other high schools we play against.

I spent a lot of time photographing the sky…

It was quite beautiful…and way more interesting than the game.

For some reason, the sky made me sad though. OK, I know some of the reasons. Sometimes I wonder why my brain can’t just move on. What does it think it’s doing? What is the point of all its ruminations? Why doesn’t it just decide to be happy with what it has and stop worrying about everything and missing the things it can’t have and wondering what the hell it did wrong and analyzing front back and center? I need more distractions.

When the game was over, I went to the gym…yes, at 7 PM. Whatever. That’s what I do during school most of the time, so it’s no different. I put dinner in the oven when I got back…neither oven is working properly at the moment, so I just put a thermometer in when I cook now and adjust accordingly.

It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it? It’s chicken, spinach, mushroom pie. Seriously. And girlchild had cooked a piece of chicken for me earlier this week to put in this, and I mixed all the insides up and put them in the pie pan and totally forgot the chicken, so I cut it up with scissors on top of the insides (before I put the crust on), and then just pushed them down into the spinach mixture. It worked. And then I put the crust on top. This is low-cal and easy to eat on those nights when I can’t deal with cooking. I just froze the rest of it. It reheats really well. We’ve been good about using the crockpot on soccer nights too, to make sure dinner isn’t too much of a stretch when we get home.

That said, their dad is going back to the UK next week for his mom’s funeral, and school will be starting for me, plus there’s soccer and Academic League and everything else, so I will have to remember to plan for cooking ALL the nights, instead of just when I think I have the kids. Brain strain. Seriously. At least I don’t have to get anyone up but myself tomorrow morning. And hopefully I will fight for some stitching time tomorrow, so my mood will be less like drowning in sad stinky cherry Jello and more like pained pseudo-acceptance of a dreary life. Sigh. Remember Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? I feel kinda like him today. I like that he could solve all the world’s problems except his own depression…that’s how I feel…except I can’t even solve the world’s problems, so I’m particularly lame.

I think I need to be one of the sentient doors on the Heart of Gold spaceship; they’re so perky and happy about their existence in the universe. Maybe I could get a brain transplant and be a sentient door instead.