The Case for Why Saturday is a Lying Jerk.

During the winding days of the week, one makes plans for Saturday, until Saturday becomes, in everyone's minds, a shining oasis in the distance–a place where all suffering ends. On Saturday, we shall join hands together 'round trees heavy with fragrant fruit, and sing Hallelujah. On Saturday, we will rest 'til our souls are replenished and then clean the house until it gleams like Cuba Zirconia. Saturday is the day we will right our relationships and satisfy our needs for leisure, introspection, community, useful activity and solitude. We will, on Saturday, restore the family to wholeness and gather together making merry. Saturday itself is doomed to disappoint.

Joy cannot survive the ordeal of Saturday. On Saturday, hopeful expectations are shoved hard against a wall and break their nose on the pettiness of ordinary misunderstanding. Arriving at the oasis, I find it to be a cluster of drunken fools, sitting 'round a lit garbage can and passing bathtub gin, still wet with their own saliva. The drudgery of a short chore list stretches its long arms into the hours that belonged to gardening and sitting happily, whistling to oneself merrily that there is nothing left to do. Family members whose hands one could almost feel grasped together with mine at the visions of milk and honey, turn out to be reprobates who trudge about letting off a foul gas of disapproval, cheerlessness or malice. Soccer games are lost. Almonds are spilled onto the floorboards of the minivan. Uninvited migraines are suffered. People say when you spend $80 to take all of them out to dinner after a soccer game "Did we have to go here?"

Saturday is a bride who, though beautiful when young, ages quickly into a toothless hag with a voice like jagged glass. She did not meet my expectations. Perhaps, I must learn not to want to much from her, no matter how stunning she may seem on approach. I will set my sights instead on summer. Ahh, summer...when I can wake blissfully whenever I want, without illness, tending gardens, writing for hours, enjoying the company of my children without the ever-present task mistress of school looking over our shoulders.

In summer, the world will surely be as it should.

How to Completely Misunderstand Capitalism

So, recently they published my salary in the newspaper. They did this, I guess, so that, in the interest of transparency, all of the citizens of New Mexico can know my name and later check to be sure that I am giving them their due, since they are currently shelling out $10,588 a year for my labor as a reading instructional assistant. I won't say a whole lot more about that. I could, but I won't.

My husband works for local government. In all honesty, we are both lucky to have stable work and live in a great community. Also, I truly love my job. It gives me something I am accountable for–somewhere I am known as a reliable, competent person and it makes me feel happy and worthwhile. I enjoy the kids I work with, and I go to sleep every night knowing that I make a difference. It's better than crack, actually. Well, truth be told, I have never used crack, but I am supposing it's better. 

Truly, Mike and I are blessed in many, many ways. However, we have crappy stuff. 

Our thirteen year-old minivan has a big stupid crack across the windshield that was caused by one tiny pebble many years ago. We have never shelled out the $300 to replace it. Things have been falling off of the van for years–weather stripping, the passenger side visor, various knobs. The side mirror is cracked and we stuck a new mirror with an adhesive back on top of the old, cracked one. The heating and cooling system periodically makes so much noise that it sounds as if a dead body is rattling around in the dash. One has to decide how important it really is to be cool, when weighed against the assault on one's senses. Our small house is filled with areas of duct tape over glass, chipped porcelain, uncovered insulation, and un-patched sheet rock. Our carpet looks like it has been used to wipe down a muddy pig, which is not too far from the truth. We are the people of the broken things.

Because of all this, I would not necessarily be opposed to making money for some of the fifteen to twenty hours a week I spend writing, even though I also do this because I love it and I want to. Consequently, I realize I should submit some of my writing for publication. This, however, is a bit overwhelming to someone as mentally scattered as myself. Below are some thoughts I wrote on this earlier this month to my friend Tangled Lou: 

I was looking through Writer's Market this A.M, trying to find a target for either a re-worked version of my What is not Simple piece or a piece on the decision to home school, explored from a personal, non-polarizing angle, and what I find is that mostly the expectation if you are a writer is that you should work your ass off for free, carefully acquaint yourself with each publication's last six months of offerings, and do everything but offer blow jobs for the privilege of being published. Of course, I will happily follow all of these rules and submit my blood, sweat and tear-covered writing for rejection, in the faint hope that someone will publish it, so that I can say to myself, with conviction the words: "I am a writer."

I will keep trying. One of you probably needs to sponsor me, perhaps call me every day and give me specific task items that I can complete in this area. Right now, Submitting Written Work lives in the category of Things That Fill Me With Terror, along with Blog Design, Blog Promotion and Networking. So, I think I need to keep thinking of other things that might make me some money. What I'd really like is to be discovered in a "Wow! You're great. Let me pay you lots of money to do just what you're doing!" sort of way, but I fear this may never happen.

I would be willing to run ads, if I liked the ads. I hate paper towels, so I don't want them on my site. I also don't like packaged snacks or disposable diapers. I would be willing to advertise treatment facilities of good repute or wildlife centers or progressive think tanks. And these are always looking to run ads on small blogs with a monthly readership just under 3,000 page views a month, so I'm pretty much just waiting on a call there. I wouldn't mind running ads for other bloggers, artists, wonderful non-profits...

In fact, during this thought process, I have gotten so inspired in realizing that I could use my blog as a pulpit to promote the people and organizations I care about, that I am all ready to offer ad space for free as a public service...and this is why I suck running a business. If I was a hooker, I'd probably just start giving away sex to poor homeless guys who couldn't afford it on general principle. I'm that good at this.

I think I'll just go back to my socialist phonemic awareness curriculum. In the meantime, please send checks. Make them out to "Hopelessly Deluded Ninny."

I have this parenting gig well in hand.

I have reached the stage of my blogging career where I am prostituting everything I write on virtual street corners. I say prostituting, except that I am getting paid in comments and page views instead of cash.

I wrote a letter to give my son Rowan, in honor of his adolescent coming of age ceremony Sunday, and he will not allow me to publish it to my blog. That I wanted to publish it–and that he said no–are not, in and of themselves, terribly problematic. What troubles me is that the evil desire to do it anyway is like a crumb in my bed sheets. I itch to publish every single artfully strung together collection of words that I produce. It happened again today, when I emailed a blogger friend, continuing a delightful back and forth which I look forward to the way other people anticipate American Idol. Afterward I thought, when I had sent the email, that there were some good lines in there. And yet I sent them in an email and can't post them on my blog.

Here begins my spiral into serious mental illness. Have you conversed with me in the staff room? If I tossed off a clever line, be sure to look for it later on Faith in Ambiguity. Heart to heart conversations with my kids? Captured on audio to be later transcribed into pieces for Blog Her. Pillow talk? Recorded for posterity. Look for my shopping lists to appear on Twitter. Nothing I write is unworthy of your public consideration.

I have clearly lost all sense of perspective and purpose.

Maybe I'm dreaming of whoring out my day-to-day written communications because I can't seem to write anything else today. I sat down this morning and spent forty-five minutes on a single paragraph. The topic metamorphosed from spiritual transformation to writing advice to reflections on working with teenagers. I deleted more text than I committed. After carefully sculpting one single sentence with the same effort that Pygmalion beget Galatea, I looked at what I had written and realized that it was self-involved twaddle so boring I didn't even want to read it. And so, whooshing down the drain went the carefully safeguarded writing time for which I sacrifice sleep, exercise and worldly accomplishment.

I am, however, making this lost time up now through a means which is the tried and true stand-by of parents whose muse strikes at the wrong time: Parental neglect.

This is O.K. Many parents have pursuits which are important to them, and to their other family members, I tell myself, and these can sometimes cause disruption to the evening routine. Par for the course. One practice many parents seem to have abandoned is the preparation of dinner. This, at least, is the only conclusion I can draw from the following typical description of an afternoon's activities as related to me by mothers made of much stronger stuff:

"In five minutes Little Bobby and Betsy will be home. I have to take Betsy to violin lessons and Bobby to hockey. After that, my husband Jim is going to be home briefly before he heads out with Betsy to soccer practice. Then I promised to bake cookies and bring them to a PTA meeting. So I should go now."

I guess I can't do as much as other people. My feeling is I can  hold down a job or I can clean the kitchen. I can either have three children or go to the Post Office. But not both. That is much to much for me. However, I can damn well cook.

Clearly, these people are doing it wrong. They are serving their kids crap. Or sandwiches. Which are pretty much the same thing. What I do, on the other hand, is carefully plan and prepare nutritionally balanced meals with two or three varieties of vegetables apiece. I put these in front of my kids every night and afterwards, we compost them. It's part of the cycle on Nature.

So at least my neglected children, whose right to privacy has been undermined at every turn, will have had the opportunity to look at produce every night. And I can rest easy, knowing I have this parenting gig well in hand.

Decisions: They Drip on Your Hand and Kill Insects

I hate decisions.

This is one of the pitfalls of  faith in ambiguity. Ambiguity does not lend itself well to resolution.

I live from a commitment to question myself, the world and other people. It's like a spiritual practice. So I always knows that any choice I make is not "right." It's just the choice that I make. I then can't help wondering what I would be giving up in making that choice over another one. If I choose vanilla, I have to give up chocolate. I will never, ever know what chocolate would have been like. I have forever consigned myself and my life to a future full of vanilla-based consequences. What if I regret it? What if I know immediately that  vanilla was a lousy choice? The ice cream case of that moment is closed forever.

"Decide" comes from the same root word as "pesticide", "homicide" and "suicide". To kill multiple alternatives in favor of one. Decisions are asshole psycho killers.

Clearly, some decisions are more fateful than others. What do I eat for dinner? That will have only minor consequences, unless I choose to eat something which later kills me. What do I wear today? Same thing. It's these big choices that dog me–the ones from which it is hard to turn back–more significant but just as permanent as the cutting of your hair. It will grow back, but you will have to live with it for a long time.

It's funny, because I am not at all prone to regret. I save all my energy for worrying about whether or not to make a move at all. When I do, I tend not to look back.

Our family has some big decisions on the table right now, and I am dithering about them. I have time to dither, so it is O.K. But the moment will come when I have to choose and I will either be holding chocolate or vanilla in my hand.

I need to stop taking this shit so fucking seriously.