Archive for February, 2008


Bearded Woman?

Last night we went to the rehearsal for a wedding where Mike and I are both in the bridal party. Sebastian, also, is the ring bearer. That kid looks SO good in a Tux. I guess everybody does, but seriously… they’re going to pass a law forbidding him to walk around in one. There’ll be accidents on every corner.

Anyhow… I stopped at Starbucks on the way there and ordered a triple mocha grande, and the barista asked if I’d like yet another shot on the house. Being sick and really drained that day, I said sure and hooted with excitement. Four shots of espresso!? It was all good for a while, I felt like I actually had energy to get through the dinner. After a while, though, I started feeling like reality was trying to jolt itself out of place. I ended up driving home (alone again with the kids, as my husband really didn’t get any time off for this wedding) in hysterics. I was crying, shivering with cold (despite my fever of 100.4) and basically unsure of what the hell was going on with me.

Perhaps it has something to do with my chemical imbalance, which requires me to take amphetamines (which I haven’t in years). Maybe my chemistry reacts in an odd way to “uppers” in general? I dunno.

I have a doctor’s appointment today, in about two hours, and then a hair appointment and I’m expected at the church at noon.

After all this excitement, Mike brought me some Aleve and a bottle of water (after making me go to bed) and I finally slept. Today is better, but not for lack of weird ass dreams.

Last night I dreamed I was shopping (Oh crap, still haven’t picked up a wedding gift) and ran into the children of my ex, Travis. We have a nasty history which I won’t go into, but he’s also in this wedding party and his kids were at the rehearsal. At the rehearsal dinner his son and daughter were seated right behind me, and as kids are like to do -they visited. She wanted to hold Charlie and despite my best excuses (he’s sick, he’s fussy, he’s heavy) I finally let her hold him a minute. The son accepted my excuses, and in fact went to wash his hands after tickling the baby. As he interacted with the child on my lap, it occurred to me that he looked a lot like his mother (who I went to middle and high school with).

So in the dream I was in the apartment these children share with their father, and we were all planning something. For a while, there was some sort of dilapidated old shack that we were using as a club house, and it was about to fall over. Outside the windows (the shack was old grayish wood, weather beaten and flimsy with glass paned windows) there were a few other structures that were also on their last leg.

Suddenly we were back in the apartment (which looked only vaguely like their actual apartment) and Tiffany, my old schoolmate and mother of the boy) was cooking for them and he was calling her mom. I remember being taken aback that someone had replaced their father’s last girlfriend so quickly and they were calling her that -and then I remember that in his case, she actually was his mom.

Then I was shopping in a large department store again, walking out into the mall area,and met some girls from high school. They were the type who didn’t talk to me much, homecoming queen runner-ups, and they were purchasing name-brand clothes at a discount and trying to sell them from a table in the general mall area. I looked in a mirror and realized that I was not only shirtless, but also covered in a chest hair that was wavy and over an inch long. The nakedness didn’t really bother me, nor did the hair. For some reason, it occurred to me that every woman had chest hair like that and it wasn’t a big deal. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that these girls I was talking to might think it was gross. This seemed relatively amusing to me.

Still, though, I was looking at my “patch” in a mirror and relatively unconcerned about it. That’s about the time I woke up -contemplating my chest hair in a mirror at the mall.

OMG it’s a new day.

Okay, so I’ve been moored in a sea of lethargy for weeks now. Somehow, this morning, I woke up and felt like maybe I could start to snap out of it.

I got up and dressed. My husband actually woke with the baby this morning, so I was able to use the bathroom and sit down for a moment to collect my thoughts. For some time now, I’ve been considering making lists -things to do, schedules for each day, things that piss me off, etc.

In general, a lot of things have been irritating me and I think that part of my lesson in this phase of life is to be at peace with the things I cannot “fix”. This isn’t to say that I’m typically a “fixer” who takes pride in making others change their ways, or demands that things be under my control. At least not openly.

Being an Aries, there is of course some amount of megalomania to my personality but it’s mostly due to this uncontrollable drive to make things be “just” and “right”. Of course, both of these things are pretty subjective when you think about it a minute. There are exceptions of course, but even then there’s usually more than one shade of very dark grey.

Anyhow, here’s a list of things I want to do. Just for kicks.

1. Start posting two blogs a day: one here in LJ, which I am eternally loyal to, and one on my wordpress blog (gasp!) which will eventually start paying out, I hope. I only have two because this blog has been a part of me for nearly ten years now and I don’t want to pollute it with thinly veiled marketing slugs if I don’t have to. That just feels like I’m selling out my oldest and dearest blog.

2. Start a themed blog, something like “Guess what psychological disorder I have” or “cooking with Adult ADD” or something odd and humorous like that.

3. Write down my dreams every morning.

4. Clean and rearrange our bedroom, furniture and all.

5. Find a freelance writing or online gig that will provide at least a supplemental income, which we cannot continue to live without.

6. meditate daily

7. exercise at least twice a week, for starters.

8. Walk the dog every day (which could perhaps help cover #7)

9. include this blog, embedded, on my new website, www.marydiamond.com

10. Look backward through all my posts and privatize anything that I don’t want my local social group to get a hold of. Because if people who knew me ever got around to digging here… let’s just say I could end up pretty humiliated.

Winter’s Here to Stay

I just walked the dog around the block, and it is really beautiful outside. Big fluffy puffs of snow are falling and there’s already a thick layer covering the ground. Of course, this just means I’ll be out shoveling the sidewalk and driveway tomorrow morning after my husband leaves for work… but I kind of enjoy shoveling snow. For the first few minutes anyway.

Seeing all the beauty out there just further frustrates me, however, because I’m STILL waiting for my tax return present (to myself) to arrive. I ordered a camera, a fantastic digital SLR that I’ve been wanting forever, and I thought I had found a great deal on it. Then I got an email from the web store I ordered it from saying it was backordered. Indefinately.

Is that legal? Instantly I was concerned that they were trying to pull some bait and switch maneuver where suddenly the price I clicked on isn’t right, or there’s an additional cost to get the camera to me. The email said that it would be overnighted at no charge and my account would not be charged until it came in stock, but that they couldn’t tell me when that would be.

Oh my god, I want to take pictures of so many things! My 8 month old is standing up on furniture now, and my 5 year old is becoming quite a ham. The dog’s cute as a button (when she isn’t crapping on the dining room floor) and the world outside is covered in fluffy white snow. On top of all of that, I’ve really been wanting to take a “before” picture of myself in underwear so that I can hang it on my bedroom wall and scare myself into exercising and eating right.

I want my camera!!!

Blogtastic!

This past Saturday night I hosted bachelorette party for a good friend, and boy was that stressful. In the end, all my obsessing over details, procrastinating, and scrambling at the last minute to make the event live up to my mental vision (story of my friggin LIFE!) turned out to be an unhealthy and unnecessary waste of energy. Things came together pretty well -aside from my causing the bachelorette and maid of honor to be over an hour late for dinner.

The bride had a BLAST, danced her butt off, and actually ended up profiting off one of the games I came up with on the fly. My husband believes that these events should be top secret, like forever, so I won’t go into detail… but in the long run it really felt good to see the girls enjoying themselves.

On the home front, I’m thinking of making a schedule for each day of the week in order to create a more consistent lifestyle for the kids and to help get our family’s social and physical wellness on track. It seems like life just grabs me sometimes and throws me way out into left field. The problem with that is that I’m a stay at home mom, and people rely on me to be responsible in so many situations that I often feel like a complete failure. Even my blogging is becoming more sporadic than I’d like. Maybe once I finish the schedules I’ll post a rough draft here and you can all tell me what you think. Is that obsessive? I hope not.

 


I signed up for payperpost for a little while ago and just found out I got approved! I’m pretty excited about the idea of blogging within a kind of format, but I’m still kind of unsure how the whole thing will work.

There seem to be a lot of cool options and opportunities on the site, and I like that instead of “customer service” they sign all their help text and such with “customer love”. That’s cute. Also, I’ve been checking out the opportunities and the vast majority of them are relevant to me -so I think anybody reading here would benefit from hearing about them.

So maybe, after all these years of blogging about things I do or buy and what I do or don’t like -I can start to maybe benefit in more than just a theraputic way from all my hard work. =)

I’ll have to go chat up some of the PayPerPost veterans and see if they can tell me what it’s all about. So far, I’m really hopeful and anxious to get rolling with the posts. So stay tuned!



Sleepless In Illinois

The baby has been waking up, like clockwork, around 4:30 am every morning this week. I’m not really sure why… but I’ve been sleeping badly on top of the early morning wake ups -so the posts have been slow in coming.

Weird dreams have been a symptom of my fitful slumber. Earlier this week I had a dream, most of which is lost to me now, but upon waking up I remembered the snapshot image of an internet address on the bottom of a full screen ad of some type (seen in my dream) and I wrote it down. Now that I look at it, it doesn’t make any more sense than it did then. I know it made me feel slightly anxious when I wrote it down. It wouldn’t actually work as an address, I don’t think, but it looked something like this:

Q: uinformeveryonewhothistraitoris.info

Multiple google searches on multiple variants of this string came up with no results, so I just googled the phrase “could you inform everyone who this traitor is” and here‘s what I got.

It’s a description, partly the experience of the writer and partly hearsay, of Jane Fonda’s visits to POW camps in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Kind of gives Barbarella a whole new feel, doesn’t it?

OMG I did it.

I published my website. Now, instead of coming directly here when you go to www.marydiamond.com, you’ll actually see my site, complete with a link to this blog.

The designing part was actually a whole lot of fun. I really enjoy graphic design, and figuring out how to publish the damn thing only took me several days. Thank heavens for FrontPage extensions. My only problem is that godaddy.com is still putting a strip of ads on top of my page and that’s kind of ugly. Oh well.

…more to come. Check out my site!!!

Not at MY school…

I’ve been a student at Northern Illinois University for about three years now. This semester I didn’t register for classes in time to get in, and ended up staying home -I plan to go back for summer classes.

Yesterday’s shooting is still settling in for me. When the phone started ringing here at home, I answered the calls and assured concerned friends that I was safe… all the while wondering how serious the situation really was. The schools website only said there was a campus alert and to avoid the King commons (near the student center and about 100 yards away from Cole Hall, the building where the shooter was). Later, when I got more details, I started to feel a little panic.

So far I haven’t heard any names, and I hope to god that it wasn’t anyone I know. I’ve had classes in that very room, and in fact I considered taking a Geology class this semester because it would have fulfilled an interdisciplinary credit I need. I keep imagining what it would be like to be sitting in one of those huge lecture auditoriums and see a gunman walk in. They’re really huge, like an old movie theater, with a sloping floor and wooden seats that are uncomfortably close together. The scramble to escape or crouch down into the rows would have been terrifying.

If I had been registered and attending classes this semester, I probably would have had my 8-month-old in the campus daycare, which is also just about a two minute walk from Cole Hall. My heart would have stopped in my chest if I had to go and collect the baby, knowing that his life was in danger like that. My thoughts go out to everyone who was on campus yesterday, and everyone affected by this.

It’s almost hard to believe this really happened. I guess I can be grateful for my issues with procrastination, for once.

Not at MY school…

I’ve been a student at Northern Illinois University for about three years now. This semester I didn’t register for classes in time to get in, and ended up staying home -I plan to go back for summer classes.

Yesterday’s shooting is still settling in for me. When the phone started ringing here at home, I answered the calls and assured concerned friends that I was safe… all the while wondering how serious the situation really was. The schools website only said there was a campus alert and to avoid the King commons (near the student center and about 100 yards away from Cole Hall, the building where the shooter was). Later, when I got more details, I started to feel a little panic.

So far I haven’t heard any names, and I hope to god that it wasn’t anyone I know. I’ve had classes in that very room, and in fact I considered taking a Geology class this semester because it would have fulfilled an interdisciplinary credit I need. I keep imagining what it would be like to be sitting in one of those huge lecture auditoriums and see a gunman walk in. They’re really huge, like an old movie theater, with a sloping floor and wooden seats that are uncomfortably close together. The scramble to escape or crouch down into the rows would have been terrifying.

If I had been registered and attending classes this semester, I probably would have had my 8-month-old in the campus daycare, which is also just about a two minute walk from Cole Hall. My heart would have stopped in my chest if I had to go and collect the baby, knowing that his life was in danger like that. My thoughts go out to everyone who was on campus yesterday, and everyone affected by this.

It’s almost hard to believe this really happened. I guess I can be grateful for my issues with procrastination, for once.

Web Junkie

Well I found a tutorial on FrontPage 2003 the other day, and once I actually read through it and did the exercises -I really started to understand how to use the program. My father did the same thing years ago with his website, Chuck’s Odyssey, and despite his urgings I really didn’t attempt to learn it all.

I was really proud of him for figuring out how to design his own website. Maybe he can still be proud of me for following in his footsteps, just a few years later than he wanted me to.

Anyway, so for the last day or so I’ve been hunched over my computer playing with buttons and graphics and content and hyperlinks. Hopefully very soon I’ll actually have a whole website up at my domain, rather than just redirecting to this blog. There’ll be a pretty little button that links here, and lots of other goodies too.

At the moment, however, I feel like I’m going to pass out across the keyboard. I’m getting too old to stay up until 4:30 in the morning. On that note, Sebastian actually refused his bedtime story today. I was a little shocked when he said, “actually mom, let’s skip the story tonight” and leaned back on his pillow. “I’m just so tired” he says to me.

I hope that it’s just because he’s been sick and is recovering now. Granted, he’s getting older and learning to read himself now… but I always want to read his bedtime stories to him. It’s like a ritual for us. I think I’m getting va-klemped.

Skeletons in my closet

When I was 13 my parents separated. It was the first step in a decade of gradual distancing, and they moved back in together several times before the eventual divorce. Each time they resumed domestic partnership it was for monetary reasons, but as a young adult I was being repeatedly forced into an environment of resentment and frustration.

We, as a family, sought counseling and a few short sessions later I was seeing a therapist and my parents were still blaming each other for our family’s strife. I didn’t really open up emotionally to the woman I spoke with each week -if I could go back in time I’d pour my heart out. One thing she did manage to accomplish, however, was to diagnose me with adult attention deficit disorder.

I haven’t taken the medication in ten years, and although my life hasn’t exactly gone down in flames… I’m not at the top of my game either. Relatively simple strategies in life are escaping me, and I just can’t ignore it any more. Just for kicks, here’s some info from a web site I was visiting.

According to Dr. Thomas E. Brown of the Yale University School of Medicine, “ADHD is essentially a name for developmental impairment of executive function.” Executive functions are the skills involved in planning, selective attention, motivation, and impulse control. Adults with ADHD have problems in six major areas of executive functioning:

  • Activation – Problems with organization, prioritizing, and starting tasks.
  • Focus – Problems with sustaining focus and resisting distraction, especially with reading.
  • Effort – Problems with motivation, sustained effort, and persistence.
  • Emotion – Difficulty regulating emotions and managing stress.
  • Memory – Problems with short-term memory and memory retrieval.
  • Action – Problems with self-control and self-regulation.

Oh yeah, I was trying to make dinner when I started this. More to come…