Sharp, pleasure-filled breath inward

I see myself as a smaller than everything cartoon and did this well before Lizzie McGwire, mind you. I wish I could squish your status up to my belly in a giant note hug to me piece of treasure. 

an ear to ear, super pleased with myself giant grin

the most simple grin ever dropped

perfect circular pink spots perch on my mouth corners.

Witches

Their power source is others' misery and negative attention.

When people laugh at their stealthily crafted, secretly negative jokes.

Secret and stealthy.
Secret and stealthy.

Bringing the world down one ruined smile at a time;
one smile-of-a-brick-of-a-smile at a time.

crumbling cities, skylines, view-finder windows full of skyscrapers, so many jutting and expanding.

too many in the space; defying physics.
CHOCK_FUL;
towers and towers full of positive energy.
knocked down, wrecking ball.

You know it's evil what you do,
Black Magic.
Insidious.

Unreasonable

Today I'm adorning a corduroy, green, mini skirt.

(A little unseasonable, I realize.
Well, actually,
reasonably seasonable.
There should be nothing so stretchy about being able to wear a mini skirt in Near-May.)

Avert your eyes! lest you    
                                              be

                                               blinded.

                                               Blound.

                                               Bound--

                                               by an enticing,

                                               unexplainable attraction.

Like Craigslist personals.
Or buying flowers.

The Good in Them

One of the best things about being a mom is getting an excuse to re-little myself.

We love walking, spontaneous walking adventures.

I got from someone once that a home isn't a home until you've explored what's around it.

"We're adventurers! Adventurers never give up!"

M. said this when I suggested she go around the "mountain," which was actually just a 6-ft tall pile of dirt and rocks in the middle of an unconstructed sidewalk.

We found lots of treasures, also referred to as clues: eye-catchingly colored beer bottle caps, dried up corn husks, a plastic letter "Q" from a marquee, and an intricately detailed button.

At every corner, whenever there were "which way do we go" moments, I let them choose. We couldn't move forward until they agreed on a direction. Taking turns, valuing a peer's ideas, staying together were all lessons our walking enforced.

To convince them it was alright to head back towards our house we started pretending we'd been on a 100-day walking adventure. We'd had to sleep on the ground, even when it was wet. We lived in the forest, in the woods.

Really immersing myself in the experience, at one point I exclaimed, "We'll never find our new home! I'm giving up hope, I'm getting discouraged."

As a mother living under the poverty line, the most valuable thing I can give my daughters is Imagination Fuel.

"Don't worry," says Maya. "I have enough hope for all of us. I have enough hope for 100 people!"

::

I rubbed little Em's back until she went to sleep.

"Do you want me to scratch your back, Mommy? I'm very good back-scratcher." Her sweet hand touched my face in a way that was more gentle than I'd ever seen her touch anything. She smoothed my cheek skin and gave me a look that reinforced everything good in the whole world.

::

The good in them outweighs everything else.

Boyfriend Box

Warning: The contents of this post will lead you through the deep, dark, irrational thoughts of a girl who's been stop-seeing-each-other-ed.

Any and all indications that I was emotionally victimized are completely unfounded and it's unfounded for me to imply that at all. I indulged my ridiculousness and wallowed one last time so I could write a good essay about it. And that's where this came from.

::

I'm sad, I said I wouldn't be, but I am. We said no strings attached, but the strings snuck in! I had no idea what they were doing! I swear, I was sleeping, and SOMEONE came in and tied my heart to yours.

And, unfortunately, like when you pull apart a wishbone, I got the side that ripped. It hurts. 

And I may have considered if ONLY for the briefest shadow of a second--
putting things on your Facebook wall insinuating that you are a woman-beater. I'm sorry! I'm sorry. 

                "yeah -- @ ___ (your name here)"

Then I found an ad on Craigslist looking for a couple to play strip poker with. And I sent you the CL link and say “we should just get back together to do this. Didn't you always want to have a threesome?” Just trying to trap you with my awesome boobs and sexual liberty, rrRawr...

But it'll be ok.

I had a vision once, where I met Aziz Ansari.
Soooo, yeah.

Trying to realize my potential with the two little lives mine is entwined with is confusing enough.

::

I used to put my boyfriends in boxes. I’d break up with them and put all of their little mementos: notes, things they’d made for me, things they’d given me as gifts, pictures everything, in a little shoebox, with their name on the outside in sharpie. Then I put all those boxes in another box. 

It's a little serial-killer-y, you think?

Like when you think you're insane, you're definitely not insane. When you think you're a little serial-killer-y, you're definitely not a serial killer.

Oooooh--wait--not killing people serially is what makes you not a serial killer. I don't do that. So we're good there.

::

Anyway, the boxes are good. You can look at the boxes and be happy and know, "there are good things in there."

Monday Musings

I love the way it feels when I quit smoking cigarettes. That's why I can't stop! Seriously! It opens up the creative part of my brain. I think it stops working the same way for a while and then the flood gates open back up. There's so much more juice flowing through the wires that it floods the levy and picks up magical bits along the shore. These magical bits are added to the monologue as fairy dust. And we fly, we fly away.

If you can time the quitting with a creativity-forcing life situation (negative money, husband being a douche, no money, car troubles, ill mother, many, many guys, illnesses, two moves, everything changing) HA! Culminates to inspiration.

Research: Jesters

nobody LIKES toothpaste

"Don't just suck it off" is what I just said to my three year old daughter.

She was brushing her teeth.

We currently have three different flavors of toothpaste. They don't like any of them! I just want them to LIKE brushing their teeth. So I don't have to harp. 'malways a'harpin'.

I don't care that no one was there to laugh with me at that.

Except I totally do.

April 2nd 2013 Tuesday 8:54 pm

The girls and I walk home. We play red light green light. I am sick, I am tired. I am getting sick. But that's not the end of the world. They make medicine for that. Once at the bottom of our hill, the hill down Reeds which ends maybe 150 ft from our front door.

“Red Light!” I shout. They stop in their tracks

“I'm going to say green light one more time. Whoever gets to the door first wins the race and gets some candy. Green light!”

They are excited. They run past me quickly. I audibly observe how fast they are. Gleeful giggles, over the shoulder glances. Up the steps now, half a flight to get to our floor. Maya loses a golden shoe and begins to despair.

(Her whiney voice has been catered to for a year. Give her anything she wants just to make the loudness stop. Just so he doesn't have to hear that whine right now. God. So loud, so whiney. Can't take it.)

I encourage Maya to keep going, “we'll get it later!” I say, Emery catches up to Maya as Maya hesitates to react about her shoe-dropping. Without missing more than half a step, though, Maya kicks off her other shoe, laughing in surprise at the events. Maya is about six feet in front of Emery when she touches the door and is so excited, so proud of herself. Emery dramatically throws her tiny body onto the floor. On her belly. Sincere, sad sobs crescendo out of her mouth and onto her face. “I wanted to win, I wanted the candy.”

“Get up," I say! "Get up, the race isn't over yet! It's alright Emery!” I help her up and we take two more steps to get to the door. She wins! I touch the door just a hair of a second after she does. “Guess what,” I say. “Guess what, the first place and the second place winners BOTH get candy!!”

I make a huge deal about presenting the candy (they actually requested popsicles instead). I get the stool out for Maya to stand on. They have these construction paper heart flowers, one with a glitter “E” the other with a glitter “M.” I have them wait by the dining room table while I get the scene set up. I try to make my mouth sing a celebratory, respectful, patriotic song but the only thing I can come up with is a mouth horn sound singing some dark, villainous theme. Ah, well. They don't know much of a difference. 

They are invited to stand on the prize podiums. Emery's “E” is on her spot on the floor, Maya's “M” is on the stool, the highest spot for the first-place winner.

I make an announcement speech dedicated to each one of them. Emery's speech highlights how she never stopped trying, never gave up (even though she did). Really she got the better, longer speech. Maya's speech just says that she was the best, first-place runner. But her pedestal is a little higher so that probably gets the point across sufficiently. Cancer: you know how you're scared to dig underneath layers and layers of wet, soggy leaves? Well, that's kind of like cancer. Like, you can never know what you're going to find underneath all that excess. I'm so tired. I can't even lift up my head. I'm getting sick, fast. I'm so tired. 

Medical Theories from Someone with Nonexistent Medical Experience

It is my belief that many of our psychological disorders that are developed at some point later in life, come from our own actions.  These are my theoretical and philosophical and existential beliefs related to depression and alzheimer's.

Depression

“It is no little thing to make mine eyes to sweat compassion,” said Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Origin: from the stifling of crying.

My father hated loudness. Loud laughing, crying, door shutting, talking, everything. Spilling things was also cause for severe disappointment and exasperated sighs that bordered on temper-blowing. But, I digress.

Crying and laughing are adaptations that are solely human. They relieve a tension that cannot be relieved any other way. In my own personal experience, tension is not relieved unless I can make inhuman sounds come out of my mouth, inhuman, loud noises that come from way deep down in my belly. Uncontrolled wailing, unsuppressed sadness transformed into air waves and vibrations and eye sweat. It's beautiful and un-substitut-able.

It is my belief that if this inner tension produced by tragedy, stress, sadness isn't expunged through uncontrollable sobbing it will turn into clinical depression.

Survival of the fittest:

LET IT OUT;

wail it out;

whale it out?

Alzheimer's 

Origin: from trying for years to forget regrets, eventually the brain relents and learns to forget--everything.

Pretty self-explanatory. I haven't done the research but I wonder if there's a correlation between traumatic pasts and Alzheimer's diagnoses. Or maybe people that are prone to traumatic lives due to other mental illnesses and chemical/nutritional insufficiencies have the same genes/chemical make up that leads to this disease.

In other news: Weed helps! THC and coffee (among other things) are good preventers of the evil and feared Ally-Z.

In conclusion:

Learn to feel. And think and work and live with your history. Not against it. Like I said, purely theoretical. And, hopefully, not offensive.