Thursday, April 29, 2010

Hamster Wheel Rant


Sometimes we get so caught up in WHAT NEEDS DONE and WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO DO that we get bogged. You spend your days doing something along these lines (change it up as it fits you... no two puzzle pieces are exactly the same but the formula is pretty solid) :

You wake up to the buzz of an alarm. Reaching over and bitter due to the loss of dreams, you slap the snooze bar and wish you could sleep one more hour. That one more hour would make the day so much better. But you think..."I have to get up and go to (fill in the blank here. Work. School. Get the kids ready. Something along those lines.)" But what you want is that other hour.

Five minutes later, it buzzes again and you roll out of bed and head off to (shower, get the kids ready, drag on clothes, chug coffee... etc.).

Off you go to do (what ever it was that you had that alarm set for) and wish that it was your day off from (whatever it is you are off to do.) Unless you are a stay at home mom and then you wish for the weekend when things "slow" down. (They don't. That, too, is an illusion. You have to drive to soccer practice, cook three meals, get that laundry done you did not have time for during the week and fit in family time... so the "slow weekend" isn't going to happen.) You do it for (however many) hours and then come back and (eat, feed kids, do homework/help kids do homework, work your second job, etc.) and wish for the comfort of that bed you left.

Eventually, you get to go back to sleep and do it again tomorrow.

It is a hamster wheel. And at some points you afford enough money to buy (that car, that ring, that vacation, that thing...) you have been working so hard for and find that (the car requires gas and has high insurance, the ring is uncomfortable but looks great, the vacation leaves you more tired than your day to day life) so you get back on the wheel to earn (that other thing that is better than what you have.)

And while all this is going on, we complain that the weather is too (hot, cold, wet, dry...) and we wish we were (anywhere but here.) We are STUCK in our job/life/relationship and nothing can change that.

Well, nothing can't. Continuing to do nothing will change nothing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. If we go by said definition... Are you insane?

Nope. You are just doing what you are supposed to. What is expected of you, and why wouldn't you when it allows you to "fit in" and be like "everyone else." What no one says out loud is that they are all wishing they were doing what they wanted, too. But they are afraid.

Fear. We fear rejection. We fear sticking out. We fear people laughing at us because we are different. We fear that we are going to be alone.

And so we make ourselves alone to protect ourselves from all of it. We become as beige as possible and fit in and wish...

Well, I love it when someone looks at me and tilts their head and says, "You're weird."

Why, thank you.

And all of this rant was brought to you because my baby looked at me today and said, "But I am trying to be like everyone else so I can have friends. People will like me more if I act like them."

I blinked and my heart broke a little. Can't people love him because he is the one and only Ash? Is that why Justice tries so hard to be a mean girl this year and last year she was a sweetheart? To be what they are "expected to be" rather than the wonderful people they are at heart just to "fit in."

I want a world where they aren't afraid. All I can do is continue to be very me. And show them that people like me as me and that you can be whatever you want and people will like you. Also, I have got to stop the "I am supposed to" mindset.

I am supposed to do what is right. If what I am doing does not feel/seem to be the right thing... then I don't have to do it. We only do what we choose. Choose wisely.

Monday, April 26, 2010

TV at our Home


We don't watch a lot of television at our house. Mostly we go on long rambling walks over the Ohio countryside and take pictures of the world around us. Or we are buried in books because I am a mean mommy. But what we do watch is usually programmed into the DVR and we watch it when I allow TV time. I guess it never occurred to me until today during Ashton's live lesson for homeschool with his speech teacher how random our tv preferences really are.
Steven Hawking has a new show on the Discovery channel. Being huge Discovery channel and Science channel buffs (okay, read NERDS), we are watching that series. We caught one this morning and will catch the other tonight... I promised. So he was regaling the teacher with Hawking's view of the universe and aliens... and that probably, mathematically, it makes sense that there is other life out there... and about the WOW signal. I was giggling. He remembered the Wow! signal out of all that. Pretty neat. Go Hawking.
He also was impressed that the guy cannot move and yet can think about such huge meaningful questions rather than sitting around feeling sorry for himself. :)
Then he went into a diatribe about Steven Kings The Langoliers. Oops. Well. David is really into Stephen King and do you know how hard it is to find a NOT SCARY Steven King movie? *shrug*
I flipped through the DVR. We have those, Dead Like Me, Glee, House, Vampire Diaries (Justice is just meeting the characters I fell in love with in the late nineties...) and Dr. Who. We have stopped Dvr-ing the Clone Wars because David is grounded and Ash is on Tech ban but could not so easily dismiss the new Who's. I would have had a full scale riot had I nixed Who.
I have a strange bunch of kids...
Man I love the Brat Pack.
Oops, time for another episode of Mythbusters... gotta jet (fuel).
See ya soon.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Stupid Commercial

So I was getting ready to write this blog and Glee was playing on the TV (first time watching it and it is amusing) and all of the sudden I hear, "Droid."

Since my phone says that, I pluck it up and start looking for the text message that obviously came in.

Yeah, the commercial was almost over before I realized it was the beginning of that stupid Droid commercial and that my phone had nothing to do with it. I love my Droid. I now hate Droid commercials. Faking me out and making me look stupid.

So the school poisoned David today again. I think they don't look at it that way because they cheerfully looked at me and advised me I needed to get another bottle of Benadryl for them because they have gone through a whole bottle by repeatedly feeding my child food that he is severely allergic to this year. Do you realize severely allergic means the kid cannot breathe if he eats the crap and does not get meds?

Hence, it is David Poison.

On that basis, if it was any other kid and they had given them, say, cyanide once... the mom would be pretty mad. But hey, mistakes happen. The school said it would not happen again.

BUT THIS IS THE FOURTH TIME THEY HAVE POISONED MY KID. I am beginning to think they are trying to kill him off.

Okay, I would save lots of money on Sketchers, but I admit I am rather attached to the lil guy. One kid is not going to their school anymore. They are trying to kill the other one.

Oh, and they lost Justice today. Then they called me up and asked ME if I knew where she was. Um. Well, okay.

Comforting, that.

If a doctor had a track record like that, he would have no living clients.

But there is little accountability at schools. They say no child left behind. I think they mean, "Except your three."

Monday, April 19, 2010

Check it out!!

http://lisapietsch.com/2010/04/19/virginia-nelson-on-judging-a-book-by-its-cover/

Check it out!! I am guest blogging over at bestselling author Lisa Pietsch's blog.
Please comment :)
Virg

Sunday, April 18, 2010

John Doe or How to Kill a Zombie with Math

John Doe was an ordinary man. His very ordinariness sometimes made him somewhat nauseous. The only thing John was good at was math and at that he was truly exceptional. In everything else, he was ordinary. Nondescript brownish hair fell over eyes that were not sure if they were blue, gray or just the color of mud. It really depended on which of his ordinary button-down shirts that he chose to wear which color that his eyes most resembled. Not that anyone but John's mother had ever noticed the changing eyes. Few people paid enough attention to John to notice much of anything about him.

Then the zombies came. It was just another day driving home from the office and John's mediocre job as an accountant for a mediocre firm when the man lurched into the road in front of John. John slammed on his brakes and stared in horror at the disfigured, formerly human, creature in front of him. The zombies had taken over Washington and it had happened without a blip on Fox News, without a single siren going off... it had just happened.

What was John to do? All he had was his exceptional math skills and his very ordinary nature...