Lion and Magic Boy

My life has reached a crisis state. I’ve been trying to hide it but there’s no use any more; things have simply escalated to a point I can no longer deal with. Even if that means ending a sentence with a preposition.

I need a new blogentity.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when I looked at one of my stupid Pages over there in the sidebar and said, “Fuck! Who was that bitter angry woman who wrote all that shit anyway?” and I stomped around angry for an entire day wondering who it was that broke into my blog and wrote all that stuff. Then I realized that person had been me, and I was no longer that person.

Fine. Change the stupid Pages then.

Right. Not. Because my stupid fucking blog is BROKEN and I can’t FIX IT. Yes, I have Googled “wordpress can’t edit pages delete posts” and I’ve come up with some threads where people tentatively say stuff like “you have to query your wp_options table”, a phrase which causes my brain to instantly snap shut as it requires digging into my database, and I don’t think my blog and I know each other well enough yet for that kind of unalterable intimacy.

I have upgraded to WP 2.5 and that did no good. Right now the message (in red, no less) “YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO DO THAT” is staring at me unblinkingly, taunting me. I never even asked WP 2.5 for anything! We only just met! And already it is telling me NONONO to questions I have not yet asked.

Also I want a new theme. Fine. Because I found my blog twin, and I am still stumbling about stuttering a little at seeing my very unique (but free! downloadable by anyone!) theme I never bothered to customize in use by someone else. Someone else quite like me in many ways, which is totally cool. But still. A little weird.

So I’m getting out. Making changes. This is no longer the ALL of me I want to present.

But the stupid fucking Pages. Will follow me.

So I need help.

Help? Anyone?

I have so much to tell you!

First, there is the thing about the neighbors. I have mentioned the neighbors before. There are a lot of them.

Dog-Poop-Catapult Recipients left. Oh, that was a major event! Boxes upon boxes of undefinable objects sitting out at the curb for weeks, trips back and forth to their 600 cars. At first I thought only some of them were moving but no, Big Daddy took his SUV and left also. With all three dogs: Big, Medium, and Yappy.

And then there was quiet.

For a day.

Then the pickup trucks arrived, and the New People came.

I was going to give New People a big bag of apples, and then I got to thinking that maybe they don’t eat apples and anyway isn’t apples a weird thing to bring a new neighbor? So I skipped the gift thing.

He is a karate instructor. She is bigger/taller/more muscular than he is (and he looks pretty buff).

Which explains the sounds I hear at night, like someone is using the wall between our places as a kickboxing dummy. Not that there aren’t a lot of various loud sounds coming from my place from time to time, but every night. Like at 10 pm. THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP.

He also spends a fair bit of his time on the phone. On the porch. Which is under my bedroom window. While he smokes. Until 1 am.

However, everything balances out:

Day before yesterday, another moving truck appeared behind the house across from me, the house that’s next door but with a strip of grass between. If you’ve been keeping up, this is the house of Judgy Bus Stop Mom. All day as I was in and out I noticed the three-year-old standing on the truck ramp but never saw anyone actually putting anything in the truck. Were they moving or simply storing a moving truck in their driveway?

J.B.S. Mom said hello to me, first time in months! She didn’t mention the large moving truck not six feet from her, so clearly she hadn’t noticed it yet. I didn’t want to give anything away, so I didn’t either.

At the end of the day they were finished levitating their invisible goods into the truck, and it was now out front with a trailer attached and they were attempting to drive a car onto the trailer. I dragged my free stuff that even Craigslist doesn’t want to the curb. J.B.S. Mom was out there watching Husband try to drive the car onto the trailer. “Once you don’t want something, no one else does either,” she remarked to no one in particular. Still nothing about moving. Perhaps no one had told her? I was prepared for a big emotional scene with her crying and sobbing about how much she’d miss me, but I think the strain was getting to her so I let her off with a have-a-nice-life nod and a semi-smile at her semi-joke.

This week Serena had her Worst Day Ever At School (something about a lost mitten; no pie for her!) followed by One Her Best Days So Far At School (something about a friend and plans to play together the next day). Life should be like that. Passionate and intense.

Eric amused himself in the Indian grocery yesterday by turning in circles in one spot until he fell down on the floor last cleaned in 1982.

I now despise Freecycle as much as Craigslist; could you explain why you are upset at me because I wasn’t home when you came to get my crappy FREE dresser, when you never told me when you were coming? And also? Woman who came to get my daughter’s very nice outgrown clothes? Is there a reason you didn’t tell me your six-year-old was INCREDIBLY FAT AND THEREFORE CAN’T FIT IN THOSE CLOTHES so you’re going to sell them on eBay? I know you are so couldn’t you have just been honest about it? And then I would have given the clothes to the 4000 really nice people who emailed me repeatedly and actually wanted clothes their kids could wear instead of making up that bogus story about your house burning down. I wish I had had the balls to just not let you have the clothes.

And today it is sunny and it is warm and I will go outside. The end.

I am so awesome. And on the radio! Last night. But through the magic of, uh, stuff that gets recorded and saved, you can listen to me channeling about connecting more deeply to your inner self here. For two hours. I was, like, the whole show. Because I am awesome.

(Please ignore the first 1 minute 25 seconds of annoying intro music. I have no control over that.)

Also, if you haven’t been to my site and you’re into stuff about self-awareness and all that, have a look. I am very, very good at what I do and I get a lot out of connecting with people this way, helping them find their life path etc.

Connecting With Self by Karen Murphy

Dear Craigslist,

I adore you, I really do.  Especially your “best of” posts.

But I have some issues with your people.

Why is it so hard to give away something for free?  I have a metal bed frame and box springs.  They’re in my garage.   I have a moral objection to throwing away something that is perfectly good, but it’s been ten days already and it’s still here.

No, I will not help you get the bed frame and box spring to the Shore.  Which is like 2 hours away.

It’s free.  It’s in my garage.  You need to come and get it.   These are the parameters.  So please don’t email me and tell me to call you in three days.  I won’t remember.  If you want the thing, find a way to contact me.  Don’t ask me to hold it for a week for you while you figure out your transportation difficulties.

Did I mention this is free?  A free item.  Free.

If you tell me you’re going to come and get the item, please don’t keep me waiting all that afternoon and then not show up and not answer emails.  Yes, you’re doing me a favor by helping me free up valuable garage space, but let’s work together here, shall we?

Free.  It’s still free, people.

And Tuesday I’m taking it to the curb.  I give up on you.

Love,

Trying Freecycle Next

Serena’s been wanting cake.

Let me back up. In about three months I’m going to have a lot less stuff and I figure that includes things like 4 cans of organic pumpkin and every kind of dried bean known to man and an astoundingly lot of saffron, something I use about once a year when I remember I have it. So I’m kind of on a mission to use up everything that I’ve hauled from one side of the continent, almost, to the other and then back again, especially since I figure that with moving and storage costs, those cans of organic pumpkin have cost me about $18 each and I am damned well going to use them.

And somewhere I found some boxes of cake mix that may have come from the Clinton Administration but that stuff never goes bad, I’m pretty sure.

And I also found a can of crushed pineapple, which sounds like what’s leftover at the pineapple-canning factory after they’re done stamping out all those identical round disks and sliding tubes of them into cans. But I can’t let anything go to waste and from some dim memory I pulled out something that used a box of cake mix, a can of crushed pineapple and a can of cherry pie filling.

Sounds awful, but I made the mistake of mentioning it to Serena and before I knew it I was in the cherry pie filling aisle noticing how many different types of cherry filling there are. Who knew?

So Serena, the new cook, mixed up the cake batter using the pineapple juice as the liquid and using melted butter instead of oil. This was looking pretty good. I was visualizing yellow cake with bits of fruit in it here and there.

Then she added the cherries, and by “cherries” I actually mean “glutinous wet purple mass with some darker wetter bits in it,” along with the pineapple sludge and we spread the whole thing in the cake pan and into the oven.

By that time I was pretty prepared for what came out but still held out hope.

But no, what we have is a dense, moist purple brick.

I keep making everybody’s pieces larger and larger in the hope that the purple mass of denseness will soon disappear before it spawns but it’s not going away.

Spring is here, sort of, I think. Normally I would start opening windows this time of year and pretend that the air outside is better than the air inside, but this year I can’t, because:

A. The windows are stuck closed.

B. I have sprained both wrists opening jars of martini olives and therefore can type yet not operate window mechanisms.

C. The neighbor has been having a bonfire since January.

You guessed (B), didn’t you?

But no.

In January, the chain saw started. One tiny treelet at a time. All day long. And what do we do with our chainsawed treelet pieces? Why, burn them, of course! In a great smoke-belching fire. All day! Since January.

So apparently the neighbor has decided to do something with the house that was all boarded up since I moved in here. I had no idea there were that many treelets on that property, enough to require the constant use of a chainsaw and keep a fire burning for three months straight.

I mean, I guess they are using the chainsaw to cut down tree-things and then burning them. But I just had a thought about the movie Fargo. Could the boarded-up house have been filled with discarded doll heads or random bodies stashed there?

Good thing there’s a whole 20 feet of sort-of woods in between my driveway and the House of Burning Nutjob. I feel safe now.

You might have noticed there’ve been some changes around here. Yes! Dropdown sidebar thingies! (Which, I might add, I’m still not used to because I still find myself scrolling way way down like I used to whenever I want to read one of my favorite writers or something, and why hello, yes, I could be using my Bloglines or Google Reader but for some reason I insist on doing some things Old School, because, you know, I like to waste time and all. Take yesterday, when the Craigslist guy showed up to take my 1997 Cuisinart off my hands, the Cuisinart I bought because It Would Change My Life, the one I hardly used except about once a year to make hummous or something because the damn thing weighs about 90 pounds and takes up valuable countertop real estate that I was not willing to give up, and besides I do have KNIVES for that sort of thing, but this guy said he was a cucina, which translates to “kitchen”, and although he was on the larger side I certainly wouldn’t think of referring to him as a whole entire room or anything, but hey, that’s his call if he wants to say “I’m a kitchen!” or something, you know? Far be it from me to take that little joy from his life, you know? Anyway, he says that you can chop the celery in the Cuisinart and then the carrots, and then the onions, all without cleaning it in between! And then when you put-a the meat-a in it for the spicy meatball-a, you only have to clean it one time! Save-a you time! And then I was sort of regretting selling the thing in pristine almost-unused condition to a Craigslist guy for a mere pittance when I could be saving time by making meatballs, but you know there he was in my livingroom and I had to let it go.)

[Points for Longest Parenthetical Comment]

[Oh! Before I completely leave the subject of upgrading blogs etc., you should read this well-written post about Wordpress 2.5. Me, I am afraid to upgrade because I just know Nameless Important Stuff would disappear forever, so I'll be here in my dinky wp 2.1 forever, thank you.]

So, yeah, changes! I’m changing alll the time, believe me.

But adding dropdowns to my blogroll is only the surface of the changes. The real changes go deeper. We’re talking Blog Identity here.

You know what I’m talking about. Say you start a blog in 2002 because you heard on NPR that “weblogs” are the cool new next thing. So you start a blog, you write a couple of posts, and then you forget about it. (I’m not saying that happened to ME, by the way; we’re speaking hypothetically here of course.)

So fast-forward a few years. You keep hearing about this “blog” thing. You’re looking for, you know, a creative outlet. So you start writing about shit. You start reading other people’s blogs (because you haven’t an original idea of your own), and HOLYSHIT people make money from these things???! Well, count me in, sir! I want me a piece of that!

Um…how do I get it?

And more importantly, WHO AM I?

So I looked, as we all do, for identity. My kid has Down syndrome? Great! Hook me up with the whole Down syndrome blogging community!

Yeah. And, as good as that is/was, it’s not really me. My kid still has Down syndrome, that’s not going away any time soon (hey! yesterday he was stacking nesting cups instead of throwing them! first time!), but I’m no longer the parent-of-a-kid-with-down-syndrome. I mean, I AM, but it’s not my identity. It’s his identity. (Actually, it isn’t even that. He’s just Eric, as far as he knows. He doesn’t need an identity because he already knows who he is!) And it’s not my blog’s identity.

So some people’s blogroll is kind of like high school. The cool kid’s table. And some people invite everybody to the table, because either they’re just friendly like that or maybe having more people at the table makes them look more popular, I dunno. Some people invite just their friends. I could write a whole book on the Psychology of Blogrolls.

But mine had blogs on it that I don’t read anymore for one reason or another (hey! sometimes we just don’t click with everyone, you know?), but I felt I should keep them because of the Dwn syndrome thing. Would not keeping them, once I had linked to them, signal a subtle dis on Down symdrome? Was I obligated to maintain these links forever?

Well, no. This isn’t a Down syndrome blog, though 1/4 of my kids has DS. I’ll still write about it from time to time as part of what’s going on in his life/my life, but it was never a focus here. So my favorite writers who also happen to have kids with Down syndrome are just that: my favorite writers. We’re going all-inclusive here with the blogroll. Writing is writing.

And the focus of this blog? Well, it’s me. Me me me me me me me!

So, hi. I’m Karen. I’m a channel, which is sort of like a psychic only much much better. I’m a writer. I’m an artist. I’m a mother. I’m also a cyclist, a lover, and a person who wears herself on the outside these days. I cry sometimes, I get angry sometimes, I think about things a LOT. I don’t use my real name, but it’s close enough.

Hi.

I’ve been having a revelation I’m going to share with you. It’ll probably burst your bubble, so hang onto your hats, okay? (and watch me while I try to work some other idioms into this post).

Ready?

Here you go:

Sometimes people don’t like you.

I know, it’s a sad truth, isn’t it? I mean, how can they not like you? You’re so….you. And anyway, I like you. But they don’t. Other people. Sometimes. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Sometimes people don’t like you, even if they have never met you. Sometimes people just make up their minds about you, for whatever reason. And that’s that. You can try to change their minds about you, you can try to explain situations, but it rarely does any good except make you even more vile and loathsome in their eyes.

Oh well! [shrug]

Why are people like that? Dunno. But it’s taken me a hell of a long time to figure this out. And I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about what people thought of me and trying to correct their erroneous impressions about me.

A friend recently gave me a quote which kind of sums this up, sums up where I am now in all this. Actually she gave me the quote twice, because apparently I needed it twice as much:

What other people think of you is none of your business.

Which means, don’t waste valuable time and energy worrying about what other people think of you. Because sometimes people just don’t like you. And it’s okay that they don’t like you. You, however, can just go about being more of you. And don’t waste time with stuff you can’t do anything about. Like if people like you.

(But you like me, don’t you? I mean, you really like me? Really?)

(Forget I asked that.)

(I know you like me!)

(…and I like you too)

Oh, hi. You like my new dropdown sidebar widgets? They only took me seven tries and 3.4 hours to install. And they still have issues, but unless they agree to pay half the counseling fees to get through those issues they may just have to deal with them for awhile. Hopefully it won’t affect their quality of life too much.

The sun is out, mocking me. It asks why don’t I get off my butt and go outside and run a few 10K or so. I have no answer, so I close the blinds more tightly and pretend it’s winter still.

Here’s my running log for the past week:

Day 1: Sunny. A good day to think about running.

Day 2: Raining. My first run since October shouldn’t be in the rain. I’ll wait.

Day 3: Cloudy. Does that look like rain? I would hate my first run since October to be in the rain. I might run wrong or something. I’ll wait.

Day 4: Sunny. (What? I didn’t hear you.)

Day 5: Cloudy and kind of cold. Brr. Better wait until it’s sunny.

Day 6: Where are my running shoes?

Day 7: Eric found my running shoes where someone must have stashed them in the very far back of the closet. Huh. Is that a cloud there? It might get cloudier. Better wait.

So yes, the running thing is going well, quite well, thank you. I hardly have any sore muscles at all.

[insert masterful segue here]

Oh! Serena made banana muffins yesterday. Almost practically by herself. I was only there barking out orders about how to properly scoop flour without packing it down too much and how to melt the butter without it exploding all over the inside of the microwave. Tonight she makes paella, Peking duck, and crepes suzette, and maybe steak au poivre for dessert. These kids have to pull their own weight around here.

You know how when you build up anticipation for something, it makes you want it all the more?

It all started with ice cream. I don’t eat much ice cream. Maybe once a year. It just isn’t my thing. Salty-crunchy, yes. Sweet and dairy, no. So no ice cream, not much anyway. Hardly ever.

But not long ago Matthew asked me, in a sort of intense (in a good way) moment, what I wanted. Just answering that question unloosed all sorts of things within me, since I don’t know when the last time was that I ever felt so free to say what I wanted. It could have been anything. Anything at all. It was one of those intense (in a good way) moments that you know you will remember for the rest of your life. I could have anything I wanted. I just had to say what it was. Anything. Several things! As many things as I wanted. Only…what did I want?

“Ice cream,” I heard myself say.

Wait. Ice cream? Did I just say that? And indeed, all I could think about then was ice cream, sweet, melty. The thought of ice cream was all wrapped up in that incredibly intense (in a good way) and intimate moment.

Ice cream.

So ever since, I’ve been thinking about ice cream.

The Indian store I frequent (I love being the only non-Indian shopping there) has ice cream. Huge vats of it, with indecipherable writing on the side. I did manage once to identify a picture of a mango on one and we brought home delicious mango ice cream instantly devoured by everyone. Even me, in the kitchen surreptitiously licking the spoon after shoveling it into bowls for everyone else.

But this time I wanted pineapple. Surely the Indian store would stock pineapple ice cream, would they not?

Serena went in with me. She also had a taste for ice cream. Pineapple. We looked inquiringly at the containers. One had a picture of several fruits on the side, including a pineapple. The name was “tutti-frutti”. I figured it was a mixture of flavors, including pineapple. Sure, I could live with that. So we bought a vat of it the size of Wisconsin and trundled it into the back of the car where the weight of it immediately caused the two back tires to go flat. But no matter. We had ice cream.

I amped up the anticipation factor by leaving the thing in the freezer for a couple of days while we all thought slaveringly of pineapple ice cream.

Finally, it was time.

The color of this product is best described as Fluorescent Terra Cotta. And the flavor? Recycled Cotton Candy. And, worse, somebody left bits and pieces, chunks really, of leftover dried fruit pits and skins in it. Or… something.

Even Serena, who has been known to force her way through many a (to me) disgusting thing simply to soak up its sugar content, could not be paid enough to eat a second bowl of tutti-frutti ice cream.

Maybe next year we’ll try the flavor called “custard apple.”