Five Things I Have Recently Learned

1. Water is Extremely Important.
So we just got our water back on this afternoon. Evidently the underground hose/pipe thing had a crack in it and, when half of the side yard was being dug up as they made this discovery, it turns out our well was evidently not up to code, so that had to be remedied as well. I never realized all of the things you need water for … it’s not just if you’re thirsty or something. I mean, I’m just about out of clean underwear, and my children were peeing in cups and dumping them outside. It was crazy!
The yard:

The picture Andy texted me to rag me about the waterless situation:










2. It’s Not That That Hard to Change Brakes.
When I bought my car, I knew it would need the brakes replaced sooner rather than later. The dealership was pretty upfront about it, and replacing brakes is something Andy can do pretty easily so, considering the price cut on the car, it seemed like a good idea. Anyway, they got very squeaky a few weeks ago, so it turned out to be sooner. We did the brakes in Andy’s driveway, and I felt like pretty hot shit because I actually HELPED :-) I felt so non-girly!
My dirty hands (after removing one of the tires):

Andy fixing my brakes:










3. Catching up With Old Friends is So Much Fun!
One of my friends from high school is a hairdresser in L.A. She was in the area for Father’s Day, so she organized a mini-reunion. It was so much fun catching up with everyone! The coolest part was that none of the people that went were among my close high school friends, but we had a blast. I was in the hospital on a morphine drip during my ten year reunion, so I missed out on the “what the hell has everyone been up to?” thing. This kind of made up for it. Oh, and those Mango Martinis at Blue Latitudes … they are freaking amazing!











4. Some People Are Just Not Nice.
I don’t talk smack about my co-workers, but suffice it to say that one of them had me in tears a couple of days ago. Now, I admit that I cry easily, but what I’ve always loved so much about the school I work at is how nice everyone has always been—the kiddos, the staff, even the administration. There is now a person that is jealous or threatened or something, but anyway, it’s freaking harassment. I’m trying to come to terms with it and try to figure out the best way to move forward. Yuck!



5. The World is So Beautiful.
This is the most well-placed (and best timed) rainbow I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of what is really important, and so I’m sharing it with you.

Why Don't Kids Want to Play Outside Anymore?

The answer to that question is, unfortunately, easy: because it's so much easier to park them in front of a TV, computer, or video game system. Come on, 'fess up, how many of you have said, "It's a Wii, they're getting exercise"?

I was reminded of this, one of my major shortcomings as a parent, this afternoon. Belle and I went up to Andy's to hang out for a bit. The day was gorgeous, just perfect, so Belle played outside and played hard. She and Dawn and the little girl from next door played house and ran around with a wagon and made up games with big rubber balls. Andy even flew a kite with the girls because it was pretty breezy.

If Belle had been home, she would have spent most of the afternoon watching "Phineas and Ferb" while I graded papers or wrote or whatever. It's really pretty horrible the more I think about it ...

The thing is, it's not just me. This is a widespread problem in America. Any ideas for a solution?

Yes, There's a Banana on My Windshield (or, "Friendship Rocks")

Friendship is an amazing thing. It's so odd how you can connect so strongly and completely with other people sometimes. Perhaps the best part, as far as I'm concerned, is when someone truly gets your sense of humor ... especially when the sense of humor in question is as ridiculous as mine is. What a treasure it is, as long as it is around, to feel completely understood for once.

So I had court today. No, I didn't do anything wrong (much to the chagrin of my students, who thought it was hysterical that I had to miss half a day of work to go to court); this was just the final chapter in the great divorce debacle. To say that I was upset and anxious would be a gross understatement and, despite my trip to Starbucks after dropping Addie off at school (I thought I could use the time to WRITE but--surprise, surprise--nothing was coming), I found myself almost to the courthouse nearly an hour early. I spent much of that time on the phone with Andy, who listened to me freak out as he is so good at doing.

Andy's current job involves bananas. And driving. A lot. I'll leave it at that. We have the kind of friendship where we laugh at everything; even things that are really serious somehow become funny, I swear. Anyway, Andy is referred to by some people he works with as "Banana Boy", and so there's this running joke that his alter ego, Banana Boy, is really a superhero with magic powers. It sounds very stupid when I write it and I'm sure it sounds very stupid as you read it, but it's just hysterical when it comes up in reality. Anyway, I had to explain that so you can fully appreciate what happened next, a lesson in friendship and being there for someone and, most importantly, making life a little more humorous.

I left my CrackBerry in my car when I went into the courtroom because I was scared it would ring in the middle of court or something (and I have a tendency to think it is on "vibrate" when it really isn't). When I got back to my car, I got in and turned my phone on. I noticed that I had a text from Andy, so I read it and could not stop laughing. It read:

"LOOK ... down in the alley ... it's a cat ... it's a dog ... no, it's BANANA BOY!!!! Here I come to peal away ... Banana Boy will save your day ..."

It just cracked me up like you cannot imagine. So I pull out of the parking lot and am on my way to work, and I call Andy to thank him for the text. I cannot stop laughing, and then he starts talking about "the banana", and I stop laughing because I'm very confused.

ANDY: "You mean you didn't see it?"

ME: "See what?"

ANDY: "The banana I left on your windshield."

ME: "There's no banana on my windshield."

ANDY: "I left a banana on your windshield."

ME: "There's no ... Oh, shit, there's a banana on my windshield."

And of course that was it for both of us. Hysteria ensued. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time, and trust me when I tell you that it was necessary.

I teach literary symbolism to my freshmen, and it occurred to me today while talking about shoes as a symbol in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street that Andy's banana, dropped off while he was working in the area, was a symbol of sorts. "I'm here," that banana said. "I know you're upset and scared and hurt and all sorts of bad things, but someone is showing that they are here for you--metaphorically speaking--and thinking of what you're going through." Able to send a message that serious while causing me to laugh hard enough to pee my pants (not literally, of course) ... Andy is the best friend ever, and I will never forget both his support and his laughter today.

What are some memorable moments your best friend has given you?

Home from Skiing (And You'd Better Believe There are Videos!)

We just got back from skiing. I have to wake up at 5:30 to go back to work. Yeah, I think we'll let the videos speak for themselves (pretty much : )). Oh, and I sound like a LOSER on video ... I never realized that before.

Before we left ... we have Andy being disgusting (actually, the video was shot just after he was being disgusting)



And we have a bunch of kids VERY excited at the prospect of going skiing : )



And then the skiing begins ... Here are the little kids in their lesson.



And then, of course, there was our attempt to get the big girls getting off the bunny slope and onto some real trails with their snowboards. Epic fail, as Addie would say (but that's a story for another day).



And there are a hundred other cute kid videos (and even one of me videotaping while skiing, which is kind of cool), but I sound beyond ridiculous and I fall, so let's end with Andy being disgusting, just for consistency. (Disclaimer: all six kids were in a lesson when we imbibed the beverage depicted in this video).



So there's no philosophical insight on this one ... unless you count a great day of fun a philosophy of a sort. Yeah, I pretty much do :)

Tired Children

This picture, I assume, speaks a thousand words. Maybe a million. And we haven't even skiied yet : ) Yup, Andy and his son Thomas crashed hard ...

There are six children with us--my daughters Addie (15)and Belle (6), Andy's kids Dawn (6) and Thomas (3), plus Addie's best friend Mikayla (15) and Andy's neice Jessica (8). It's a pretty full house, to say the least.

The ride up was a nightmare. My car is horrible in snow, and it was going all over the road, eventually hitting a guard rail. At that point, I refused to go any faster than ten miles per hour. Andy being the gentleman that he is (or else he just really wanted to get away from the younger kids, who were all in his car) offered to drive my car and let me drive his (far more suited to snow driving) vehicle. We moved pretty quickly after that, although I was kind of annoyed that Andy could drive my car with barely a skid--I guess when you know cars thoroughly, you can even get around the crazy winter driving issues.

Anyway, we got to the condo and had to bring the luggage up ... and some kids raring to get into the pool. We finally made it out to the pool, which was so cool. You get into the pool from inside a building, then you swim out and it's an outdoor pool. We literally swam in the midst of a snowstorm ... and it wasn't even cold : )

After returning to the condo, we all got into our pajamas and had dinner, pizza for everyone but Addie, Mikayla, and Jessica, who opted for Ramen Noodles. The little girls played hide and seek after dinner while the big girls burped (don't ask), Thomas played a computer game on my laptop (we're stealing someone's wireless ... I feel kind of guilty), and Andy just sort of relaxed (he'd gotten up at five to go to work, so he was entitled). I did the dishes and then got the girls to settle in, go to the bathroom, brush their teeth. We'd brought the game Apples to Apples (my highest recommendation, if you've never played it) and I asked Andy when I went upstairs to read a story to Belle, Dawn, and Jessica if he'd be up for a game. He said he would, but when I got back downstairs, he and Thomas had crashed on the pull out couch.

On the one hand, what a fantastic day : ) When children are tired enough to sleep soundly (and everyone is but me, so it's all good : )), you've clearly done something right. However, today was just preparation for tomorrow, when the skiing and snowboarding will transpire here at good old Sunday River.

How far can you push tired children before they reach their breaking point?

Victor or Victim?

I just won five bucks on a Super Bowl bet. I also just lost fifteen on a Super Bowl bet. I think I actually came out ahead, though ...

Let me explain.

Andy is the kind of person who wins at everything. The only game I've ever beaten him at with any regularity is Memory, and that's only because my visual memory is quasi-photographic, so it isn't exactly fair. He is also extremely lucky--he's going to win Power Ball one of these days, I swear.

Well, we played a football bracket pool thing for the Super Bowl. Basically, you pay ten bucks for ten squares. If you win, you get a hundred bucks. Not a bad deal, but sheer luck. I mean, you don't have to know jack about football to get it. Andy won. Naturally. He ALWAYS wins stuff like that.

However, there was another bet placed this fine evening. Just before the game started, prior to the chicken wings, I started shooting my mouth off about the Saints winning, and Andy started going all pro-Colt, even though he really couldn't have cared less. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.

He did. We made a five dollar bet--we even shook on it, quite solemnly ;). And, as you probably know, the Saints (I referred to them as "My Ain'ts" all night) came through!!!!

So even though I lost fifteen dollars (ten for me and five for Belle--she and Andy's daughter split a slot, each getting five squares) on a roll of the dice spreadsheet bet, I won five dollars on the bet that I made with my heart (I've got a soft spot for New Orleans because my great-uncle lived there ... And because they deserve it after Hurricane Katrina).

I'm out ten bucks, but I still feel like I won. So who was the victor, me or Andy?

Let's Share Embarrassing Stories, Shall We ;)?

Since the drama in my life just perpetuates and it's very hard to blog without doing the whole SSDD thing, I feel very negligent. Hence, I'm going to share a recent embarrassing story. It made me laugh when it happened. It's making me laugh right now. I hope it will make you laugh. And I hope you will share an embarrassing/funny story in the comments so we can have a big freaking laughfest.

So ... (And this is an abbreviated version since I'm typing on my BlackBerry, which makes my thumbs hurt)

I was at a restaurant called Big Daddy's with Andy. He was telling me that the walls in the men's room have diamond studs (like the bed of a truck or something, I don't know). Well, it seemed pretty harmless for me to go look and see what the hell he was talking about, so I headed for the latrine.

The door was open. I saw the diamond-studded walls. I also saw a guy standing at the urinal. Yeah, like I said, I SAW this guy. Waaaaaay too much of this guy.

So I go running back to the table, and a bunch of people are saying, "Hey, lady, the girls' room is that way", and what the heck was I supposed to say? "I'm checking out the walls in the men's room?"

So I tell Andy what happened and he's laughing like crazy and I'm, like, magenta. The guy comes over and apologizes. I feel like the biggest ass in the world.

But damn, did that laughter feel fine :)

Branching Out: Monster Trucks and Electrified Hair

I have a pretty quiet life in the great scheme of things. My hobbies and endeavors are generally suited to simple and mellow pasttimes like reading, writing, walking on the beach, that sort of stuff.

I had an insane weekend. Just ... freaking insane. I'm at a very odd juncture, and it just felt so good to do stuff so ridiculously out of character. Does this mean I am going off the deep end, or is it healthy?

After I got out of work on Friday, I brought Addie home (per her request), then Belle and I went back to my school to watch the boys basketball team. Andy met us there, and we watched a great game (we won!) then went out to dinner, where we were very immature with mussels.



Andy won tickets on the radio and was so excited about winning tickets on the radio that he wasn't sure what he won tickets to. Yeah ... a Monster Truck show. I wasn't going to go at first because I am not exactly a member of the Monster Truck scene, to say the least, but it seemed like potentially a good opportunity to contemplate sociology, so I figured I'd go. We went out to dinner with my friend B.J. then hit the Monster Truck event full force.

So this is a truck named (called?) Grave Digger.



And here's one called Mutt Monster, or something like that (it's a giant dog-looking thing ... driven by a woman, too, which was very cool).



Belle and Andy's daughter Dawn came as well, so earplugs were a necessity. Here's Andy putting in Belle's earplugs.





I was a little overwhelmed by all the excitement ...



Andy was pretty into the whole Monster Truck thing. I kind of think he's a loser for it ;)



So to regain some semblance of cultural sanity, we hit the Museum of Science in Boston on Sunday. It was amazing. There's a Harry Potter exhibit that just blew my mind ... if you are a fan of the Harry Potter books and will be anywhere near Boston before February 21st, I strongly urge you to go. It was just unbelievable!

In vintage me and Andy fashion, we had half a pizza left and were bringing it out to the car so we didn't have to carry it around when we decided it would be a really good idea to rent a locker instead. Here is our locker with leftover pizza (don't worry, there was a cover for it ... the picture just seems more entertaining when you can see the pizza in a locker) and Belle and Dawn's wands from the Harry Potter exhibit.



We saw a lot of other really cool stuff there, notably a juggling performance that taught the concept of atoms and an Omni Theater presentation about Antarctica. So neat! We ended up watching a show about electricity that got pretty interactive at one point ... well, for me, anyway :)



So am I regressing into who I used to be or am I progressing into a happier and more well-rounded person? I don't know, but either way, this was definitely a weekend of branching out ... and I don't think that's ever a bad thing.

Marketable Skills (and my Lack Thereof)

When I went to get my car inspected in October, I almost died when the mechanic came out and told me that it failed inspection and would need work to the tune of around $2,000 (which I most decidedly do not have at this juncture in my life).

I did what I always do in those situations--I cried for awhile, then I acted like a despondent jerk for a few minutes, contemplated filing for bankruptcy ... then I asked Andy for help. Andy knows cars. He got the necessary parts (Did you know that cars have boots? They're attached to something called a caliper. I think), did the work himself and didn't charge me for labor, and saved me many hundreds of dollars. I got my car back yesterday, and it's inspected and life is good.

Which brings me to my point. I have an advanced graduate degree. I can analyze literature from poetry to philosophy and everything in between. I educate the minds of high school students. I run the school newspaper and am the sophomore class advisor. I've written a novel and three quarters of a second one. I kicked butt on the Praxis exams (think SATs for teachers).

And it all means nothing, when all is said and done. I mean, I took a couple of courses at a business college when I was pregnant with Addie so I could stay on my parents' health insurance. While there, I learned how to type and could, at one point in my life, type over a hundred words a minute (I've slowed down some in my old age). Typing is probably my only marketable skill, and it's not even like I use it all that much (other than when I'm writing ... or blogging ... okay, I type a lot, but you get what I mean).

Andy, on the other hand, dropped out of high school, got his GED, never graduated from college, and has a manual labor job where he gets paid about what I do. And he can fix cars. He is also one of the smartest people I know, and one of the kindest.

It's funny how, on paper, I look like an educated professional in a white collar field. In reality, there's not a whole lot I can do (other than motherhood--I'm pretty good at that .. and writing. Sometimes). I can't even do the laundry without screwing it up (yeah, I mixed whites and reds and have a bunch of grayish pink ... don't ask).

Do you think the dichotomy between white and blue collar is shrinking? Do people with blue collar jobs tend to have more practical skills? And why, oh why, do some people still look down on car mechanics, hairdressers, sanitation workers, and truck drivers?

It's Never too Late to Come to Terms with Nightmares

I've spent the past couple of days pretty much immersed in the blogs of other people. The entertainment factor has been high, but I've also noticed an unfortunate trend in people being bogged down by horrible things happening to them. I wonder sometimes if there's a correlation between indescribable pain and the need--almost compulsion--to write. I think that's definitely the case for me.

Anyway, I haven't slept well tonight (it's 4:30 in the morning now) in large part because I've been contemplating posting my own traumatic sent-me-into-a-tailspin moment here to make the point that it's never too late to come to terms with horrible, unspeakable things that happen to you. I carried this horrible pain around with me for ten years before I was finally able to deal with it, and I have pretty much become a different person since that time. So ... I think I will share. But please bear in mind, names, places, and events have been changed. But what happened to me has not. It never will.

My relationship with Andy was among the most intense I've experienced in my life. No, he was not my boyfriend. Ever. He was not even in the "friends with benefits" category. What we had was somehow more, if that makes any sense. I know that most of my friends and family thought Andy and I had a physical relationship, that the unhealthily close bond between us was connected to some sort of bizarre sexual need. Nothing could be further from the truth, although I'm still not sure, even now, what that bond was.

Basically, I met Andy at a New Years party; I was leaving as he was arriving in a carful of guys. I was pretty messed up, and he came up to me as I was staggering out to my car. "Are you all set to drive home?" he asked me. I wasn't really, but I told him I was and somehow got back to my parents' house without incident.

The next night, I was back at my college apartment when one of my friends called and asked if I remembered meeting a guy when I was leaving the party. I replied, "Vaguely," and she told me the guy was her friend Andy and he wanted to know if it was okay for her to give him my phone number. "Is he cute?" I asked (I was such a shallow idiot).

To make a long story short, Andy came up the very next night. Yeah, he was cute. Like, beyond cute, actually. However, we got talking, listening to music, talking some more, playing cards, and the casual hookup I think we'd both sort of expected never happened. We liked each other too much. We stayed up all night just hanging out, and it was the first time that anyone had seemed that interested in what I had to say.

I was nineteen on that night. For the next three years, Andy and I were tight. In terms of anything beyond friendship, it was kind of strange. I'd start to think of him as more than a friend when he was involved with someone else. When he was free and hinting, I'd be occupied with someone else. And sometimes a few months would go by when we'd fall out of touch, but when we reconnected, it was like we'd just had one of our marathon all-night conversation the night before.

I'm not going to pretend that Andy was a perfect person. He wasn't, and most of the stupid things I did in my life originated with him. He was not dependable and had a hard time holding down a job. He became, in many ways, the guiding voice in my life, and this is never healthy.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if things had continued on the collision course they were on. Fortunately (as I'm well aware of now), destiny stepped in. One night, Andy and I got extremely messed up, went to a concert at the ski resort where we continued to imbibe heavily, went sledding illegally on a ski trail, got caught and verbally reprimanded, then went back to the condo and--the oldest story in the world--had sex. The fact that it was the worst sex I've ever had in my life was distressing enough--I mean, I'd started to think this guy was my soul mate. What happened next, though, was even worse.

The next morning, I asked Andy, "Do you remember what happened last night?"

"Yeah," he said. No elaboration.

"So I take it that happened because we were drunk?" I asked it lightly, expecting him to make a joke about it. Such was the nature of our relationship, and we both knew that similar things had happened to both of us before.

He was very quiet for a long time, then he said, "No. Being drunk had nothing to do with it."

And that was that. I got no answer, then or ever. We spent the day in Portland, but it was a quiet day for us. We bought a new Phish CD and listened to it instead of the never-ending chatter that was usually going on between us. That night, we slept in the same bad we'd been sharing for years now when I was at the condo. We smoked cigarettes on the balcony and threw them into the snow below. He wouldn't talk to me about what had happened, wouldn't laugh it off, wouldn't even say, "Damn, you were such a lousy lay that I'm never going there again." And so you can imagine what this did to me--instead of taking one of the many outs he'd been given (we were drunk, it was stupid, it was late, let's make sure we never do that again), he allowed me to blame myself for the sudden change in our relationship.

A couple of weeks later, things got even worse. I was up at Andy's condo with Andy, his good friend Steve, and a bunch of Steve's buddies so we could go snowmobiling. When we got back to the condo, Andy had one of the other guys, Tom, sleep in the fold-out bed with me and he went upstairs with the others. I was, as usual, pretty passed out, but I sort of remember Tom kissing me, and then it's all a blur. When I woke up, there was blood all over the bed, and the source of the blood was obviously me. I had been abused in ways that no one ever should be by this guy, who wisely left before anyone else came up. I saw Andy's eyes when he saw me naked in those bloody sheets, unable to move without hemorrhaging more blood out, and I saw whatever might have been between us die. Although it was insane for Andy to think I brought this on myself, he obviously did. We did not speak again for a long time, and then only sporadically (you say hi when you bump into someone at Wal-Mart, for example).

It was the words that were never spoken, both by him and by me, that played the death knell to the intense relationship between Andy and me. We were in our early twenties, and life seemed very big and overwhelming.

If I couldn't talk about some stupid drunk roll in the hay with my best friend, I thought ...

If she can't understand why the sight of her naked in a bloody bed with another guy less than a month after what happened between us, he must have thought ...

And so I carried this around with me. Its weight pushed down my shoulders and gave me nightmares for many, many years. Finally, with the advent of social networking groups, I started talking to Andy on Facebook a little bit. I finally realized that I needed to get this dealt with or it was going to drive me crazy one of these days, so I asked Andy if we could get together for a drink at some point, which he readily agreed to.

Although I was scared to death and unsure if I'd be able to tell him, or even if he thought I was ridiculous for not just telling him in the first place or still thinking it was such a big deal after all these years, it could not have gone any better. It's like a huge weight has been lifted; I don't know how to put it any better than that.

It's kind of funny, we went to three places that night, and the evening sort of got divided into three parts. The natural order that the world divides itself into just blows my mind sometimes.

Anyway, we started out at Applebee's and kind of chatted about our kids and what's new and my hatred for Sarah Palin (and how he's dating a girl that looks something like Sarah Palin) and such. Although we had a couple of beers, we pretty much agreed that eating at Applebee's is not exactly fine dining.

Stop number two was this amazing restaurant downtown that somehow manages to specialize in both Italian food and a sushi bar (successfully). We started getting silly, reminiscing about things like the time I did numerous shots of Bacardi 151 and then literally threw up all over the bar, all the way out to the car, all over myself, all inside the car, and everywhere else you can imagine and the time we went to Mohegan Sun and gambled away all our money, leaving us with not enough gas to get home. Jesus, we were stupid. Anyway, then I finally just told him, just spit it out, "Andy, that guy Tom, he raped me". Like, one second we were laughing like idiots, the next I was crying, then he was crying, and we had the whole "Why didn't you tell me?"/"Because you were being a non-communnicative douchetard and I was afraid of how you'd react" conversation. It was a very serious half hour or so, then we got silly again (and had more beer).

Anyway, part of getting silly involved Andy mentioning this dive of a bar that was within walking distance. He said he'd been there once and some lady got hit in the head, and the staff just carried her outside and left her bleeding in the parking lot. I realized that I read an article a few years ago about a murder occurring there. Walking there seemed like a really good idea, for some reason. Yeah. You kind of had to be there.

Anyway, it was absolutely the cheesiest, trashiest bar I've ever been in. However, there were pool tables, so I got my ass handed to me at multiple games of pool, had more beer, and made fun of the bar and its patrons as surreptitiously as possible (the old man that appeared to be masturbating in a corner, the porno video game, the fact that the felt of the pool tables was so dirty that it was repulsive, the steps going into the bathroom that I managed to trip up every time I had to pee, the multiple entrances and exits, et cetera). And rocked out to bad techno music. Haha, good times. I haven't laughed that hard in years.

The thing is, Andy was the only person that could give me any sort of absolution for a pain that I've held inside for eleven years.

And he did. He listened. He apologized. He cried.

And now, with that heavy weight gone, I can move forward.

I share this story--somewhat reluctantly, because it is incredibly painful--because I want you to know that keeping the pain inside is worse. Coming to terms with the things that happen to us, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is the only way we can stand up tall without that terrible oppressive weight on our shoulders.

I'm weak ... it took me eleven years. But it was worth it.