Writing in the Corner

When I was young, I yearned for drama in my life. When all was normal, I created chaos. When things were humming along, I’d do something really stupid so there’d be more excitement in my life. See my “Things I Don’t Blog About” post for a sampling of stupid things I did to add drama to my life.

Years later, I read in the book “Women Who Love Too Much,” that sometimes when women suffer from a low-grade depression, they get involved in stupid relationships and make decisions that will create drama in their lives, because the adrenalin rush lifts them out of their depression, at least temporarily. After my depression got better, I didn’t feel the need for so much drama.

Now, my life is decidedly low key. I am a pretty relaxed person; the only thing that really gets me angry is poor customer service. Oh, and when people treat my friends badly. But other than that, I don’t have any drama in my life; I don’t want any drama in my life.

While I get bored sometimes with the routine, don’t anybody go messin’ with my routine!

I am loving my math class. My instructor is a dynamic teacher. Very energetic and dynamic. I don’t even notice so much that English is his second language. I spent about an hour and a half tonight doing math problems and it was so fun. Older son reminded me how to solve a quadratic equation by completing the square.

Our beater car broke down on the way to the city today. It stalled coming out of the neighborhood, so I turned around to tell DH about the stall and to keep an eye out for me on the way in to New Orleans. It stalled again on the Twin Spans (a six mile bridge across the southeast corner of Lake Pontchartrain), and then again in the Bayou Sauvage, and again coming OUT of the Bayou Sauvage. By this time DH had caught up with me, and we got off the freeway. After the last stall, we just had it towed (after a very long conversation with a personable and helpful New Orleans COPS officer).

DH and Older Son are headed to New York and Boston this weekend for an Adventure. DH wants to see the Manhattan Temple, and they are going to play tourist, too. They are also going to see Fenway Park, a lifelong dream of my DH’s. Some baseball fans collect cards, others are statistics buffs. DH collects ballparks. The Orioles (his team) are playing the Red Sox. I hope the car is fixed before they leave, else I’ll have to get up at 5:30 a.m. to take them to the airport. They leave on Sunday a.m. and get back on Tuesday night. A whirlwind tour.

I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. But I’m going to stop and send an e-mail to my Org Comm teacher (I missed his class today; bummer) and do more math problems. Such fun! Beats doing dishes…but I’ll probably do that, too.

I read an article in Ladies Home Journal (it was cheap, OK?) about how women need female friends. One of the roles of our female friends is to help us work out problems with our spouses.

This got me thinking: I have (I think) an excellent marriage. We are nearing the seven-year mark, and I’m still very much in love. He tells me he is, too. We do have things that crop up, but we’ve always been able to work them out, mostly because we communicate really well. So, I can’t imagine dumping on a friend about the latest stupid thing my husband did, mostly because he doesn’t do stupid things, but also because we’ll work it out. We always do. Why air my marital challenges for others to see, even if they are close friends? Loyalty to those not present, and all that.

That got me thinking about areas of my life that are off-limits for public consumption. This is very much a “public consumption” blog. I have an audience, albeit a small one. There are areas of my life that I am simply not comfortable talking about in front of an audience, even an audience as erudite, charming, and perspicacious as mine:

• My criminal background
• My past drug use
• My teen years
• My first marriage
• My daughter’s teen years
• My sex life
• My goals
• My weight problem
• My 17 years as a believing Mormon

Some of these things - well, they’re in the past. I’m not the same person; I’ve moved on. Others are difficult to think about seriously, even years later. Others involve other people who might not appreciate me talking about it. Others are none of your business.

I like to think that I am an open person, but perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps I am guarding myself too closely, and that’s why I have so few real friends. Even the things listed above that most would agree are not anybody’s business, or that really aren’t suitable for public consumption, I don’t talk about with close friends. So how can we be really “close”?

The only real downside of this is that my blog might be more interesting if I wrote about some of these things. Maybe I can find one or two of them and write about them a bit. It’ll probably be the least interesting on the list. I would guess my weight problem and my goals.

I wish I could find a free MP3 of this song, but the lyrics have been going through my head for about the last 10-12 days. I can’t see the local weather on weather.com before May 11, but we’ve had rain every single day since except for Mother’s Day, and I know it rained for several days before that. Not just a pleasant little drizzle (though it was like that for a couple of days) but drenching, pouring, can’t see the house across the street, camaros flooded up to the hood, torrential-defining rain.

When I lived in Ohio, I got used to little sunshine. I was in a cloud belt that cut across the state, and there were more cloudy days than not. I remember when I moved to Michigan being so surprised at how often the sun seemed to shine, even in the winter. One weekend I headed down to Columbus on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning, and when I hit Findley, Ohio, I hit the cloud belt. I went back to Westland on Sunday evening, and the clouds broke when I got past Findley, and the sun shone the rest of the way home.

My four years in Lubbock were an amazing time for me. The sun shone all the time, relentlessly. It was very windy; my realtor told me that hair spray was a big seller in West Texas, but I really didn’t care, because the sun was always shining. DH and I had a little routine we’d do on the way to work (said in a disgusted voice): “Another beautiful, sunny day.” The landscape was so flat, it was like the anti-mountains; nothing to block the sky - no hills, no trees, no buildings more than 10 stories high. I quickly came to appreciate where the local marketing saying, “Lubbock has more sky” came from.

I had hoped that the added humidity in Louisiana would prevent wrinkles, as frown lines had started appearing on my forehead right before I moved here. But the moisture in the air hasn’t prevented aging like I’d hoped, and at this point I would trade even a few wrinkles for a day or five of sunshine and big blue sky.

A few days ago, the little boy was looking at the lilies out front. Some of them have not yet opened, and he said, “I think the flowers need some water.” Um, no. They have plenty of water. I think he has not yet made the connection between watering and rain.

Older son graduates on Thursday night. Tonight is the senior video. He is the emcee. I got his report card in the mail earlier this week. His GPA (unweighted) for the two years we’ve been here is 4.000. His overall GPA (unweighted) is 3.8216. I am so very proud of all he’s accomplished. He’s excited about heading off to college and he’s made some wonderful friends in the last few months, all of whom are going off to college with him. I need to sign him up for pre-testing and a dorm room. I don’t know what I will do when he’s gone. For so many years, he was “my guy.”

Maybe it won’t be so bad. DH doesn’t care that the house is a mess, so it will be a relief to not have someone complaining about what a mess the house is, without actually doing anything to change things.

Older Son went to school today for several hours to work on the Senior Class Video. When he came home after working on the project he had his cap and gown. Gasp! It’s really going to happen. He has a class meeting on Tuesday morning, the Senior Class Video show Tuesday evening, graduation rehearsal Wednesday morning, and he graduates on Thursday night. This is just amazing to me.

On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen wrote about Subjective Time, describing research that indicates that time seems to pass more quickly as we age. Here is a quote that caught my attention:

Say you are forty and you will live to eighty. According to one set of calculations, your life, as subjectively perceived, is already seventy-one percent over. This is the most disturbing scientific fact I have heard in a long time. Your last twenty years will feel like no more than thirteen percent of your life. Another set of equations, harder to confirm, puts the age of seventeen and a half (!) as the midpoint of your subjectively experienced life.

This does not surprise me at all. I remember so clearly the day he was born, and while it was not “yesterday,” (like it was for the little boy, who will be starting kindergarten in the fall) it is certainly much less than almost-eighteen years. Except that really, it’s not.

I got a couple of important things done today. I followed up with an old boss and he sent an e-mail off to a the guy I interviewed with on Wednesday. I did some dishes. I sent off an application for a federal job. Tomorrow’s important things include vacuuming and getting the dorm application off to Great Big State Party School.

I just re-read that paragraph. Readers might infer I’m being facetious in my descriptions of important things. I’m not. Other little accomplishments I made today are activities that I can crank out effortlessly. Several tasks I completed today just flow out of me: cooking the bratwurst for dinner, managing money stuff, baking a fruit cocktail cobbler for dessert. Other activities weren’t even tasks: talking to my daughter for a while on the phone, watching the repeat of the final episode of Frasier - those were just for fun. But getting the application out and making the job follow up and loading the dishwasher required a force of my will to make them happen. They needed doing, though I would rather not. And I did them anyway.

Maybe important is the wrong word. Here is a better way of phrasing it: I got many important things done today; even some unpleasant ones.

Little boy just gave me a card he made. It’s a picture of a magic wand. I think I’m going to buy a magic wand for myself. I bet they have one at Wal-mart. I’ll just wave my magic wand, and then I’ll do the vacuuming.