Sunday Randomonstrosity

 It took everything I had not to just title this "Fuck It, I'm Just Going to Say Some Stuff", but apparently I'm still clinging to a modicum of civility. 

I texted Suzanne to tell her that her that her blog post made me feel better about how scattered and distracted and weird I am feeling, and then did that clumsy thing where you're saying "thank-you so much for being relatable, you made me feel so much less lame... wait, I don't mean that to say that you're lame...." Also, Suzanne is younger and still has a kid at home that she's managing to keep fed and clothed and driven around to places, which I do not. 

I went out for dinner with my friend Pam, who I used to be practically joined at the hip with when our daughters were younger and in elementary school with. We dropped the kids off at school and went for walks, or went to the gym, or went for coffee, or ran errands and ended up in ridiculous situations (for two middle-aged mothers of school kids, which is to say, still pretty tame.) We have to work more at getting together these days since the kids grew up (annoying) and we got jobs (total drag). She picked me up and asked me how it was going and I was suddenly yelling that I thought that at this point in my life, when my kids are grown and semi-launched, when I'm not responsible for shepherding two other bodies through the day somehow, I would be... better. Like, more organized and more productive and less neurotic and more together.

Super dumb, right? I wasn't any of those things before. I think I just felt like when I had the kids here the chaos was more permissible and it was fine to have glitter footprints on the stairs and spiderman figurines in the bathtub and someday when the kids left I would get my shit together. As it turns out, with the kids gone I am the same person, just without kids living here. And I eventually stopped showering with Spiderman. 

Which is fine, it's FINE. I'm making an effort to stop beating myself up and instead sort of view myself with a kind of amused indulgence, as if I am my own un-sleep-trained, bad-at-impulse-control, all-hopped-up-on-sugar four-year-old. This afternoon I realized I was getting nothing useful done so I put myself in a time out in the back yard so I could get nothing useful done while getting some Vitamin D. I didn't put on sunscreen and could feel myself getting a sunburn on one arm because of the way the chair faces. Turns out I'm crap at looking after my inner four-year-old's outer (I was a good at mothering my actual four-year-olds, I don't think Eve has ever had a sunburn. Angus played baseball, so those were not on me).

Good things that have happened lately:

- I had a birthday party for Collette last weekend because she's getting her kitchen renovated and she likes gin and I have about thirty bottles. 

I made a menu. We squeezed so many limes and lemons that not a single square-inch of the kitchen was not sticky the next day. I made fancy garnishes that I occasionally remembered to put on the drinks. I bought sloe gin for the first time solely so I could make a Sloe Comfortable Screw (that night I gave my inner twelve-year-old free rein, while also letting her drink) - not super crazy about the drink, but big fan of Sloe Gin.

I took a group photo and then Matt said to take a selfie so I would be in it. So I took a selfie without the self.

I am super good at selfies.

Just some party people being very normal. Michael threatened me with death if I posted this on social media. Mark said to go ahead and post it on his professional page. 

-I went for lunch with Pam and our friend Sonia, and then Pam took me to the library so I could see her Fake Book Geocache that lives there.

She is really very cool and I need to hang out with her more.

-I went to Ikea with Jody. And I only bought a fifteen-dollar blanket for the couch, which is practically like going to Ikea and having them give YOU money.

Jody bought the middle one, because the left one was not pink enough and the right one was TOO pink, but the middle one was JUST pink enough. 

-I am having a trivial and yet absolutely enraging issue trying to send a package to Angus which I will probably have to do a whole cranky post about (see you on Thursday for that) (that is quite different from See you next Tuesday for that, to be clear), but Matt was calm and assertive about it and I am now ready to let it go, after being cranky about it for the post, because otherwise what's the point.

-Eve is FaceTiming me less often, which is always good because it means she's busy and happy, and then when she does FaceTime it's really fun and we have a lot to talk about. She was telling me about how bad a week her tongue was having because she burned it, and I made sympathetic noises and she said "well, actually I made it worse" and then told me she was taking ice out for a drink and I said "oh god, you tried to ice your tongue and it stuck to the ice cube?" and she said "Yep!" And then she described peeling the ice cube off her tongue and being fascinated by the little row of taste buds on the ice cube, which I told her probably meant that she is really leaning into being a biologist. And then she said she rinsed the taste buds off and still used the ice cube, and I thought once again of how much less weird and awesome my life would be if I had not had these kids. 

Oh! Suzanne was talking about having weird dreams about other bloggers, which reminded me of when we were at my sister's and I went up to the attic where Eve was sleeping and flopped on her bed so we could share our weird dreams. Hers was about being mad at her friends because they kept making plans that didn't leave enough time for all the stuff they had to get done. Mine was being kidnapped by people who said they were taking me to a Gentle Hospital, and then when we got there I looked around and realized that they actually meant a Mental Hospital (like, RUDE MUCH, Subconscious?)