A List Replete with Commentary!

As you may, or may not*, have noticed, I’ve been MIA for about 90 days now, give or take. I hadn’t expected my hiatus to expand to such lengths. I hadn’t even expected it to be a hiatus. When I wrote my last entry, “Crazy Talk: The Friday Challenge**” I intended to get back to the blog within a week, if not sooner. I mean, who writes the sentence “Jesus is fucking hot” and then disappears?

If I were to believe modern day uber-Christians, I suppose that writing something as blasphemous as “Jesus is fucking hot!” was tantamount to tempting fate. Or Fate. I dunno, can you capitalize it and still be a Christian? Is it wrong to write He was angry, so he brought down the wrath of Fate? I dunno, but I’m starting off my list of the Top 10 Most Reasonable Excuses for My Not Blogging for Three Months with the oft-cited reason:

#10: Inciting God’s wrath with blasphemy***. Said wrath included making my life difficult enough to prevent me blogging, and said wrath included a period of melancholy and existential angst. You might be asking yourself, “Self, would God make anyone feel existential angst?” And the answer to that is “Yes.” He’s a tricky God, that guy, full of hijinks, making people feel all angsty and questioning their place in the absurdity that is life.

If #10 is God, then #9 would have to be about Satan, yeah? Or a reasonable on-Earth facsimile: my ex-husband. I didn’t write my blog in part because every time I sat down, I wanted to spew forth nothing but vile condemnations of the man who I had procreated with. I didn’t know how to control the anger via my writing, and I also didn’t want to come off as whiny. I’ve been honest about John in the past, and what he does and doesn’t do. He is required to pay just $415 a month in child support, though I’ve managed to get him to pay $475 (the extra $60 being for the kids’ prescriptions). I’ve watched him get a better job, lease a new Audi (though for cheaply) while I’ve pinched along, finding ways to get the kids swim lessons and send them to fencing class. Over the past few years, he’s rarely come to their soccer games or school events. He is 2-hours away, but at some point I’ve come to realize that he wouldn’t likely come to many of these things if we were in the same town.

A few months ago, after trying to get him to share the cost of Thing One’s braces, and trying to get him to take the kids on all of his weekends (not only when it suited him), he piped up saying that he wanted to start getting the kids on holidays again. We have a parenting plan which dictates everything from shared holidays to weekends and visitation, and he wants to return to it in terms of what he gets. I balked at this, partially because the kids have said they want to be “at home” for their holidays, and partially because it struck me that he wanted the kids during the fun times.

It pains me to admit how small and mean I can be, how much I wanted to punish him. I haven’t—I haven’t said anything of substance. I haven’t pointed out that he has all but abandoned his responsibilities in the parenting plan, nor that it seems wrong that any parent gets the fun times without shouldering part of the responsibilities. But I want to, and it frightens me about myself, how I imagine refusing him every request. I want to be a good person, a better person than he is, but it’s hard. And I didn’t want to write about that, either.

Reason #8 is work, specifically something along the lines of “teaching freshmen not to be such self-centered dunder heads.” I love them, and loved my classes, but I had never taught so many first-term freshmen before, and MY GOD they were work. The crying (literally), the excuses, the sudden light bulbs clicking on. It’s been exhausting, but worth it.

#7: The election, and the fact that I donated time and energy to the Obama campaign. Also the fact that the mere occurrence of the election was exhausting. The kids were into the election, all talked about it non-stop, so that by the night of November 4^th, they were giddy with anticipation. My friend Jen threw a big party, with lots of food. The Things Three were the only kids there, but behaved pretty well. They were interested in CNN and Comedy Central, and Thing One impressed everyone when she called out, a few minutes before 8:00 pm PST, “Once California closes we’re good, because they have 55 electoral votes!”

An hour later, watching Obama address his supporters, I cried, a mix of joy and relief. And then Thing Two said something like, “You know who was a good speaker? Hitler!” Before I could say anything, Thing Three said, “Yeah. Mom—tell us a story about Hitler!”

It’s just like the Things Three to leave me with nothing reasonable to say, and wanting nothing more than a drink.

#6: If I’ve learned anything these past few weeks is that, when in doubt, blame the economy. So I will. Damn you economy! Damn you sub-prime lenders! Damn the selfish way you garnished your selfish salads!**** You are the reason I cannot blog! I am all verklempt about the housing market (though I don’t own a house) and the job market (though I still have my same year-long contract). Damn you!

#5: If #6 is the economy, then #5 would be writing about the economy. Which I did, pretty successfully, in October. Truth? I’m always poor in the summer, always skating along the edge, and this year, while I avoided the soup kitchen, I didn’t avoid the food bank. I ended up getting a food box from them, which came right before I decided to sell my plasma.

And right after I decided to sell my plasma, said plasma was rejected*****. But visiting the plasma center itself stands as a singular memory in my mind, a low, wretched building—all tile and cement block and plexi-glass—filled with poor people. One room was called the donor floor, a room with rows and rows of hospital beds. Between each bed was a machine that extracted whole blood, separated the plasma from the whole blood, then pumped the remaining blood back. “Back,” in this case, meant into the arm of the donor. The donors shivered, covered themselves with coats, and watched the giant televisions hung in each corner with something like affected disinterest. It was hard to be there. I imagine it now, the way there would be a few Christmas decorations punctuating the cleanliness and order and institutional smell. I imagine that now, with the economy tanking, there are a lot of people there, a lot of “normal” people.

#4: I had to go from a pc to a Mac, and that was rough. And I love the Mac—which was well-loved by badfreak before it ever came to me—but it’s taken some getting used to. And it refuses to log into Open Salon on a regular basis.

#3: If reason #5 was writing about the economy, then reason #3 is writing about poverty. I’m doing better now, with several new writing gigs under my belt, and a constant paycheck. But I worried that the fact I ended up back at the food bank again meant I was somehow flawed, that I hadn’t learned from last summer. I cursed myself every night in September, hated the sight of myself in the mirror. What the fuck were you thinking, I thought.

I couldn’t write about that either.  Didn't want to.

#2: I was working on my manuscript and other “real” writing, and I thought the blog would distract me from “real” work. I told myself in September that I was going to cut back drastically on the blog so I could finish my book manuscript, and so I could keep turning out pieces that I get paid for. I dislike the whole tipping system here because I think I generally get tipped when people feel bad for me, not when I’ve written something particularly good******. And also because the conceits of a blog are constricting at times. I found myself wanting to write bigger narratives—bigger in idea and scope and framework. I still want to do that, am doing that, but once I stopped blogging, it was like I stopped exercising the writing muscles or something.

The proof is in that piss-poor analogy. It’s like I’ve been gone from the gym for 3 months and now I want to run a marathon. Holy Christ.

#1: Last month, my grandmother passed away. It was time: she had been in hospice care for months, was on all kinds of medications to keep her anxiety low, to keep her out of pain. And yet her death hit me hard, made me remember the summers I spent at her house, the times she took me shopping at Penney’s—which is what she called it—for jeans I loathed. I miss her.

I also found myself missing California, and wanting nothing more than to write about it for a willing and open audience. The kids and I drove from Eugene, Oregon to Bakersfield, California for the funeral, stayed in my grandmother’s house, and had one last Thanksgiving dinner there. If a blog wasn’t meant for that story, then nothing is. As I drove back home, passed through fog and vineyards, I realized I wanted to come back, wanted back in.

Which made me realize that the biggest reason I hadn’t blogged for the first month was because I hadn’t been sure I wanted to keep going. After that, though, I wasn’t sure how to come back. So much had happened, and how do you sum up three months of a full life into a single blog entry?

I’ll tell you what you do. You make a list, and you number it….and then come up with some asinine reasons…

And then you say “I’m glad to be back.”

*tm

*I’m not even assuming I have readers left, let alone something like a “Fan Base” who would have noticed my writing absence.

**Speaking of, I have to announce a winner. I think Lainey wins for her “who is the sun” story. Nicely done.

*** Did anyone else think, during the terrible fires in SoCal, that if Proposition 8 had been defeated, we’d have been forced to tolerate numerous “God is punishing gays by sending FIRE!” It was one bright spot in the whole California-is-on-fire-and-also-gay-people-can’t-marry-there weeks. I think it says something pretty good that liberals never come up with some of these kinds of arguments.

Or maybe it just says we’re not crazy.

**** Props for anyone who can tell me what that line is from.

***** When I told several friends I had been turned down at the plasma center, they piped up with “because of your sex life?” To which I had to reply with, “No. Because I’m anemic! ANEMIC is not an STD!”

Thanks for that assumption guys. And let me say that if you ever receive plasma-based products, you would be damn lucky to get my pristine blood-derivative. LUCKY!

****** Not everyone does this, and I’m not trying to say it’s terrible that this happens, but it created a weird dissonance between me and my work.