I Give Up

My dog travels back and forth from house to house with my girl. When he comes back here, he wants a lot of attention. I've spent weeks yelling at him to stay off the couch when I'm sitting here in the evenings. He whines. He sneezes at me. He wedges himself in a couple of inches of space between me and the arm of the couch and then twists around and types on the keyboard with his claws. The more I scold him, the more he bothers me. I finally decided to give up. Now he comes up onto the couch, snuggles up to me, settles in and sits quietly. (Except right now where he appears to be trying to eat the string of the hood on my hoodie.) He never used to be so snuggly. I guess he misses me when he's gone.

Whatchu looking at?

Every morning I brew up coffee at home, put it in my travel mug and bring it with me to school. Being a slow drinker (and it being a big mug), I'm still usually about halfway done when it's time to go to class, so I bring my mug o' coffee with me. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I feel like people are eyeing me and my mug suspiciouly sometimes. Like they're wondering if I'm really this weird naturally or if there's something in my mug helping me out. Good lord, people, I'm not drinking on the job. I just don't earn enough to justify spending $2 a day on coffee from an on-campus vendor. Stop looking at me and my mug like that.

Where's My Head?

Woah,weirdness. As I typed in the title of this blog my fingers hit "rt" rather than "d" after I typed "Where's my hea". Interesting.
Let me come straight out and I say I hate this time of year, particularly this week. A big part of that is Katie and the fact that she is still no longer here and I think about her a lot when the anniversary of her death comes around. She drove me nuts and scared the shit out of me when she was alive, but I still love her and I miss her. Last year my mom gave us yahrzeit candles to light and we all talked about it before the anniversay day arrived. This is the anniversary day this year and no one has said anything, at least not to me. I'm sure we're all thinking of her though.
Sometimes I think her absence shapes so much of how I live. I feel like I have to get everything right. I have to get it all right as a daughter so my parents don't have to ever feel that kind of loss again. I have to get it all right as a mother so my girl doesn't grow up feeling as lost as Katie must have to live her life the way she did. I don't think it's my parents' fault. No one knew what was going on or how to help her find her way back. I kind of knew what was going on, but I was a kid too and had no power to make things any different. I suppose even now I don't really have the power to make sure bad things won't happen to any of us. Maybe it's just a game I play with myself, a bargain I try to strike with the powers that be-- if I do it all just right, nobody will get hurt again.

I'm Not Saying It's Spring Yet

I'm not about to say it's spring even though the weather seems like it. I know spring and February have nothing to do with one another here in New Hampshire. Even that 'r" they share is purely concidental. I have, however, noticed that the sun is up earlier. Actually, I just noticed it this morning when my alarm went off at 6:15 and I opened my eyes and saw it was already getting light out there beyond the blinds. I peaked out the bathroom window before I got into the shower and I saw the sun coming up orange in a pink sky. I'm not saying we won't be hit by some huge blizzard or an artic blast or two before spring really decides to show up sometime in May. It's just nice to see the sun showing its face so early in the day.

Roadkill

What is up with the squirrels this week? It's like the streets are paved in squirrel carcasses and gore. Has the warm winter caused them to get fat and slow? Is the lack of snow and ice allowing drivers to drive faster?
I'm getting tired of seeing smeared squirrel everywhere I go.

Told You She's Special

I always knew my girl is special. I took her to get an eye exam this week since she brought home a note from school saying she needed to get one. Not only did she get her first pair of glasses (which look adorable), we also found out she is colorblind (well, "color deficient" is the new proper term, apparently). Her father is colorblind and so is my father. I guess she ended up with that rare genetic combination and is one of the fewer than 1% of females with colorblindness. She wasn't particularly aspiring to be a fighter pilot, electrician or hunter anyway.

Instantly!

I don't think I've ever blogged about what kind of search engine results bring people to this blog,but I just saw one in my stats that I've taken a shine to-- instantly make your life less shitty.
I like that. That's something worth searching for. Less shitty. Not perfect, just less shitty. And even that's not easy, I mean, look where you end up from the first page of search results...

Sunday Ramble

I met up with my mom for brunch yesterday morning so I could give her the rundown of how the workshops went. We decided to split the difference in distance and meet in Durham, where the university is. Saturday morning at a breakfast place in a college town is a pretty busy time and we didn't get seated at a booth, so sometimes we had to nearly shout to hear each other, but it did give me ample opportunity to observe students outside the classroom. Not a pretty sight. Sometimes I wish one of those stupid makeover shows would come along and makeover the entire campus so the college girls would stop dressing so friggin shlumpy. It's like a uniform-- jeans or sweats and a gray college logo hoodie. And lots of concealer, foundation and eyeliner. Looks crappy, girls. Really.
Anyway, my point here is not to chastise the appearance of college students, or not just to chastise the appearance of college students, but to recall something my mom said to me that I thought was extremely sweet of her. After I had blathered on a bit at warp speed about the corporate training experience, she told me she thought I had really made the right choices as far as my career goes, despite some of the personal difficulties those choices had brought me (i.e, the whole marriage and dealing with inlaws thing). It was nice to hear her acknowledge that she believed that I wasn't simply out of my mind for choosing to live on the other side of the world in a culture so different and difficult to fathom. She gets that there was actual value in it and she also understands that right now my priorities are more about being around to parent my girl than they are about pursuing my career. So many people like to tell me I should go teach down in Boston, but they don't understand that all that commuting would mean less time available to spend with my girl and would also be some kind of nail in my coffin in this still-ongoing custody dispute. In a few more years she's going to be more interested in her friends and her own schedule. I'll still know what I know a few years from now and will still be able to push forward more with my "career".