Bibliomama

I am not a good person. Oh, I'm generally nice and polite to everyone, but this is only because I suffer from an unfortunate surfeit of empathy, and if I was mean or rude to anyone I would just have to experience the tiresome effect of being able to vividly imagine how that made them feel, and it's just not worth the effort. And sure, I adore my family and friends and I would do anything to help them out or make them feel better, within reason, right after The Vampire Diaries, but I'd throw them all over for a guaranteed extra two or three good hair days a month. But I'm not a good person. When I'm alone and driving around, I'm filled with rage and hatred for all the stupid drivers who don't have the good sense to just get the fuck out of my way. And man, there are a lot of stupid drivers. The ones who won't pull up far enough when they're stopped at a red light to let the right-turning people turn right (see, I always pull up far enough, because o...

You have no idea how ready I am to move on to Surly Thursdays. I am forcing myself to recall my week-end, which was filled with largely pleasurable events, rather than wolfing down my entire chocolate stash and listing my largely petty but nonetheless stabifying grievances. Friday night was my end-of-the-year book club meeting. We went to the Foolish Chicken again (half-racks all around, cue the boob jokes now). I got there at seven, and five minutes later was really afraid that my friend Sharon was having some kind of stroke or a small psychotic break because ohmygod, the loud and the belligerent and the sudden violent gestures. Happily, I found out that she had had many beers before showing up at the restaurant and was just very, very drunk. Tanis emailed our book list for next year to the waitress from her iPad, after we noticed that she was writing down titles in between serving us. Then she mentioned that she had just read A Confederacy of Dunces , which is Sharon's* extra-...

The Wife is having a fairly non-productive day, fooling around on the computer and trying to clean all the crap off the dining room table, which is really frustrating and depressing because there isn't a good place for all the crap to go, and it only highlights all the other things that still have crap on them, so she gives it up as completely futile and goes out to garden. She starts to put on sunscreen everywhere, then realizes it would make more sense to just put sunscreen on the ridiculous square sunburn she got while watching her daughter horseback riding, to perhaps marginally lessen the freaky embarrassing tan lines for when she goes out tonight. The Wife is back inside and checking twitter, when The Husband comes home early from work because he was miserable at the office and thought a change of location might make him less ineffectual for the afternoon. Since she needs to shower off the sunscreen at some point anyway and the husband being home makes watching Luther les...

Feeling blah today. The temperature outside is incompatible with sustaining life, but I didn't have to go anywhere, so I can't blame it all on that. Small irritations: I screwed around on the computer for too long before drying my hair so it came out frizzy and weird, which it probably would have anyway because, hello, eighty-five percent humidity?: my knee hurts, because I'm old and creaky: I spent upwards of three hours staring at my latest assignment in complete and utter incomprehension, feeling like a dumbass loser, before realizing that I was trying to apply the first set of instructions incorrectly and applying them correctly made everything really really easy, which should have made me happy, but instead I just felt even STUPIDER.  You know what? I AM going to blame it all on the weather. Forty degrees with the humidex. Jesus, how is that even real life?  Small funny things: Angus's teacher emailed me to say that they had been discussing plans for the...

I always come home from BOLO on such a high that I think I'm going to post about it RIGHT AWAY and the post will magically and immediately capture and convey the warmth and intensity of the evening. And then I don't. And then I can't figure out how. So maybe just read  Patti's post , which says everything I want to say about it anyway. I brought a camera but totally forgot about it. There were some acoustical glitches early in the evening, which made me sad and panicky, because I COULDN'T HEAR the first few BLOGGING OUT LOUDERS, which meant I was just downtown drinking beer on a Thursday night, which just doesn't happen in my world without a VERY GOOD REASON. We were at the Arrow and Loon, and while the courtyard area was gorgeous and accomodated us all nicely, the high ceiling was capturing the words and keeping them away from everyone at the back. So around the first break I wandered down and sat on a planter (I would have sat in someone's lap or stood ...

Eve's dance recital: This is our second year at Tournesol, with Hannah Beach , a woman there really aren't enough superlatives to adequately describe. She doesn't do any of the choreography - the kids do it all. The costumes are dirt-cheap stuff we get on sale at fabric stores or dollar stores. There was one duet that Hannah hadn't even seen before the show. She makes a speech before every recital urging everyone to adjust their concept of 'good' dancers and 'bad' dancers while watching. I could be sappy and insincere and say that they're all wonderful but honestly, it's not one hundred percent possible to suspend those evaluative faculties,  and at odd moments it's impossible not to feel your attention slip, or your eye start to roll, or an ever-so-slightly uncharitable thought about 'good' dancers and 'bad' dancers escape its confines. But this is all just part of the softening-up process, so you're in a perfect state...

Anyone who comes here regularly knows about my love-hate relationship with baseball . Well, Eve's relationship with it is possibly even more tangled and conflicted. Admittedly, we stuck her in it the first year because Angus had been in it for a few years, he loved it, Matt was a coach and by this point we knew how it worked. I don't know that I can assess her ability with any kind of accuracy, considering my own ignorance, but I would say that, as far as skills go, she's a bit above average. There were girls on some of the teams that didn't get a hit the entire season, and she usually got a couple hits a game, except for the year that her coaches couldn't pitch for shit. She's not great at staying focused in the field, but when she gets the ball she generally knows what to do with it. She's by far never been the worst kid on the team. I do sort of admire that she's as enthusiastic as she is about the game despite the furor and public adulation and n...

If I didn't have this weather headache, it would be difficult to work up any degree of surliness at all. It's been a good week. Shelved books at the library, worked out with Pam, laughed myself silly trying to learn how to play The Pink Panther theme song on the piano with Angus, built a barn out of chocolate milk containers with Eve, and yesterday I had a date with Susan, who I'm borrowing from Patti . I met Susan because her daughter dances with Eve and Olivia, Patti's daughter. Susan has tornado/candy floss hair that makes her look like a nature goddess - like all her humour and creativity is constantly exploding out of her through her hair. Sometimes stuff gets caught in it, which I like because I say "something is caught in your hair" and then I get to fondle it on the pretext of taking the fluff out. Susan lives in a fairytale house surrounded by trees - you have to go through a gate in a hedge and I always expect elves to be on the other side. The house...

I'm weaning myself off of my anti-depressant. People close to me have received this information with a variety of reactions verging from mild alarm to outright panic, sometimes accompanied by a subtle and polite edging away. Kidding. Mostly. I'm not doing this lightly, or without consideration, or out of any misplaced sense of detoxing or anything. It's just that, when I finally reached a short space of calm and insight a few months ago, I thought back and couldn't really say with any confidence that I've been, on the whole, better on this medication than off it. I don't think there's any question that my brain chemicals don't always play nicely with each other, or with my other bodily processes, or with the way the world works. It would be nice to think that there was medicine that would help with this, and it's entirely possible that there is. I'm just not certain that I've found it yet. Years ago, when I didn't really know what was...