It’s my birthday
I want a cake
I want candles
I want a party
I’ll get a card from my husband
And a present – from my husband
And I’m grateful for that
But I miss birthday cakes with candles and parties
The good – we seem to be starting a business. It started as fun, making sugar scrubs to use ourselves and give to friends. And then my friend said, “we could sell these,” and I replied with, “we could totally sell these!” and so it started. Two white witches, playing in the kitchen – the magic was wild and the giggles, and silliness, and joy, were just about visible. The scrubs are pretty amazing, too.
The bad – I’m stressing about family stuff.
The strange – I seem to be part of three again. I am always one of three, or one of me. I’ve been one of me for a long time. I didn’t realize how much I missed the three till my friend said, ” this person wants to meet you, she wants to be three again, and she wants you to be a part of it.” YES! I didn’t even hesitate. Yes, we are three. Joy, light, peace – this is what we bring.
The ugly – if one more person posts a picture of that damned puppy-sized spider, I may puke. I know I’ll be having nightmares for the next week. Ever hear of a trigger warning, assholes?
What we think it will be:
Crisp days, cool nights, leaves turning beautiful colors
Fires in the fireplace
Long, cozy nights, reading by the fire
Knitting warm snuggly things
Drinking hot chocolate
What is really is:
damp, cold days that make my bones ache
leaves falling off the trees and rotting in piles, or needing to be raked – which in turn, makes my bones ache
fires that smoke and fill the house with soot, wood that has to be hauled inside, ashes that have to be hauled out, wood smoke making it hard to breathe, and carrying all that stuff – makes my bones ache
Knitting a couple of pairs of mittens before the cracks in my fingers start to bleed and make it hurt to knit
Hot chocolate gives me a migraine
And the best part – it’s just a precursor to Winter. Winter makes my bones ache, my body ache, and my head ache.
There’s a word whose meaning has changed greatly in the past few years.
It used to be that someone was your friend because you liked that person, you had things in common, you did stuff together, you made each other happy.
Now it’s someone who knows someone who knows you and clicked that little button on facebook. You can’t say no, because then they’ll want to know why you don’t want to be friends. You don’t want to say yes, because you really don’t know the person, but you do it anyway, to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings.
People grew apart, didn’t see each other every day, stayed friends – or at least felt some affection for each other even if contact was minimal. That was part of life People change, they don’t like the same things they did years ago, and they may like you in small doses. I have friends I see rarely, speak to once a month, call or text on occasion. I know people who are annoying in even small doses – and they probably feel the same way about me.
And yet, they’re “friends” of mine. Daily, they post updates, often several times. It’s like getting endless phone calls to tell me that there’s a bird on the bush outside. Thanks, there’s some information I couldn’t live without today.
Then there are the cartoons. Endless cartoons about how bad ass they are, what bitches they are, their road rage and their impatience. Trust me, we know all this. Posting it on facebook every day does not make you a bad ass. It makes you someone trying to convince other people that you’re a bad ass.
Or they post recipes. There’s this handy site called pinterest that lets you collect things like recipes and patterns and cute little sayings, all in one place, so you can find them later, and you don’t aggravate your “friends” with them.
But that’s another topic. Friends – once they’re on that list, you can’t get rid of them without hurt feelings. It’s not just one way, I was recently “unfriended” and it pissed me off for days. Weeks! I proceeded to block the offender, if he doesn’t wish to be my friend, he has no reason to see my posts. So there.
It’s still Summer. I don’t want to think about Winter. I don’t want someone telling me how close it is, or how many days to Christmas, or how bad the weather is going to be because they saw a three headed toad and that means we’ll get 4 feet of snow on Columbus Day. If someone said these things to me, I’d tell them to knock it off, and it’s doubtful we’d be friends for long. But facebook, oh, that wonderful thing – it’s not so easy.
Is it worth the stress to be connected to people I don’t really like that much? I don’t think so.
It’s already dark and it’s not even 8:00.
Soon the cold will come, and the dark, and my body will hurt all the time instead of just part of the time.
Soon the snow will blanket the field. Blanket – stupid way to describe it. It will smother my fields. It will kill my grass, and hurt my trees, and turn everything brown and dead. Crunching under my feet – no, under my boots, boots that are heavy and hurt my feet and make me feel like a clod when I try to walk. I want bare feet, running free through the grass, green grass, freshly mowed, not crunching under my clod hopper boots.
It will layers upon layers of clothing, making me feel constricted, unable to breathe, unable to move.
It will be dark. Dark and cold, and dreary.
People are wishing for snow. I’m wishing they’d shut up.
We’ve done our last therapy event. I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it.
We went to an event today and spent almost two hours trying to get Max to settle down, relax, just stop for 5 minutes. We walked laps around the field, we stopped for 2 minutes and back to laps. I think I sat for a total of 15 minutes. I know it’s hot, I know it was noisy, I know he was stressed. I know it’s not his fault, but I can’t put me through this any more. I cried half the way home. He just won’t settle down. It’s not fun any more.
And if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing.
It just astonishes me. I was raised by parents who valued education, who took delight in reading books and learning new things, who tried very hard to appear intelligent and had no patience with people who “acted stupid.”
Mother corrected our grammar, our spelling, our pronunciation of words. Poppa read all the time – and when he spoke about something, he usually spoke with knowledge of the facts. (I never could persuade him that professional wrestling was fake, but otherwise, the man was smart!)
It broke their hearts when grandchildren chose to quit school, to have babies out of wedlock, to work at entry level jobs and have no ambition to ever go further. My father worked in a factory, my mother stayed home with the kids. There wasn’t a ton of money, but the bills got paid, we had food and shelter, clothing, and we made our own entertainment. We didn’t need Starbucks, we didn’t need unlimited data plans for our phones – we didn’t even have phones, how did we survive?
I’ve stopped counting the number of times I see “your” and “you’re,” and “their, they’re and there” misused in a day. I’ve stopped correcting most of them. I was unfriended by someone this past week because I corrected him – and hurt his widdle feewings. Poor baby, it’s sad to be stupid and sensitive all at the same time.
Yes, I said “stupid.” I know that’s not politically correct. I also know it’s true. When it becomes a point of pride to announce that you “don’t care about all that spelling and grammar nonsense, what are you, a teacher or something?” then I don’t want to know you.
Unfriending – such a silly thing. If you don’t want to be my friend, you don’t need to read what I post – so don’t go crying off into the sunset about how the wicked witch blocked you.
And that brings me to one more rant. I’d like to find out who started these stupid “memes” and slap them. If you have to keep telling everyone what a badass, or what a bitch you are, you might want to ask who you’re trying to convince. If you were really all that bad, we’d know without you telling us.
A few months ago, a “friend” posted a goodbye message and disappeared.
He didn’t answer emails, or posts on a facebook account, or twitter questions.
Nothing. After 10 years, or maybe more, he was just gone.
We were friends, or so I thought. He was much closer to some of my friends than he was to me, but we were still friends.
And now I wonder. What was it all about? Did he not get something he was setting us up for? Was it all fake? Is he okay? And do I care?
So there’s this whole huge thing about donating to ASL or dumping ice water on your head and people are going nuts doing it.
Am I the only one who sees this as a very subtle way of bullying people into giving up money? I don’t have $100 to donate. I don’t really want to dump ice on myself. I choose my causes. I’m not saying this isn’t a good cause, it is. I just don’t like being “challenged” to do something I don’t want to do, and being made to feel like a bad person because I don’t want to do it.
I’m thrilled that people are donating money. I hope they find a cure for this disease. I just don’t think this is the way to go about raising money. Yeah, it works. That doesn’t make it a good idea.
I think there’s a switch somewhere that I don’t know about, one that tells Max exactly when is the worst time to start barking.
I’m recording narration for slides for a class. Last slide, almost done, he starts barking. I’m sure there’s a way to edit that out, but I don’t know how and I don’t have time to learn. I barely have time to get this done – it’s not looking good for that – and having to do things twice, or three times, or four times, is not helping.
I need a shot of booze or something
Suziecreamcheese Sings the Blues 
