Happy Halloween

Swift fire spread through
her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without
a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life ?

Spots

-I have a HUGE spot on my chin that may require stitches.
-E crying and whining at 10:21 pm last night (in his room). Still up at 5:30. lack of sleep makes me hate myself...
- E is yelling at the tv california not california not california not california not california. augh.

Score card: E -1 mommy - 0

Jeez where do I begin?
Well daddy left yesterday and so it is down to 2.
Pick E up from school.
He is hungry and eats and entire PB&J sandwich, score 1 for mommy.
He watches a little bit of the debate with me. He keeps calling McCain, Joe Bidden. I tell him "no, that is old man McCain, he is the bad guy." point to mommy. mommy 2- e 0.
He refuses to take bath. there is the first one for E. I trick him by letting him eat pudding in the tub. I think I lose a point for that. mommy 1 - E 1.
I break a cardinal parenting rule and walk away from the bathtub and go to fold some clothes in the other room. I can still see him rubbing something thick looking in his hair. It is my oil based super moisturizing body butter lotion. Point to E.
It is impossible to wash out and so he looks like a big grease ball. mommy 1 - E 2.
He spends like an hour in his room while I watch Americas Next Top Model and hoark down a 22 of Anchor Steam lager.
He comes out around 8:48. The threats start. mommy loses a point. mommy 0 - E 2.
I watch Leeann win Project runway. At least they shot down Kenley in a very satisfying way. But I wanted Korto to win. I liked her stylo.
I go to bed.
4:30 am
-mommy I have to pee.
-you peed?
-no I have to.
-ok
I take him to pee but I don't want to turn on the light and wake either of us up any more. I hear the pee hit the shower curtain. I have to take off his jammie bottoms because "they got all wet" with pee!
Back to bed- point to E for not peeing the bed. Mommy 0- e 3.
4:38
-mommy there are skeletons in my room
-ok get in the big bed. point to E. Mommy 0 - e 4.
We fall asleep face to face and he has his hand tucked into the pillow.
4:58
I wake up to a toenail in my lips. Make a mental note to cut toenails in the morning since my lip is bleeding. Roll over and go back to sleep.
8:45 wake up to E crushing my head with his legs.

trick e to getting into stroller because we are going to the bagel shop. (point to mommy)We do go to bagel shop but on route to school, because he doesn't want to go.
Drop him off at school and get cornered my A, a big girl at E's school. She tells me in great detail about her recent tooth loss. I feel faint as she wiggles her tongue in that icky tooth hole. you know what I mean with that red cushion of blood...swoon. I tell her I am not a fan of blood stories. So I take my leave as A screams "blood stories, blood story, blood story" at me through the mail slot. Point to mommy.
Final score: mommy 2 - E 4.

And by 10 am today my parental duties are done until maybe midnight tonight. I am going to a show tonight, by myself. I am having our beloved babysitter pick up Elias at school. I cannot remember the last time I went to a show by myself....
Jon and I were supposed to go together.
Then this trip came up suddenly. So he is in Vietnam.

month long catch up

So E started school. It is very exciting. He is doing a great job. Of course I am having a bit of a hard time. I feel guilty that E is in school and since I have thrown my identity to the wind, I am finding myself a bit lost. His first two days of school I went and saw three movies. Vicky/Christina/Barcelona (the new woody allen movie), Death Race (I snuck into this one, is there anything more thrilling) and Hellboy II. Then this week when he went to work I was a little paralyzed.
I miss him when he is at school. I wonder while he is doing while I smoke pot and watch crappy movies on HBO OnDemand. Such is our financial situation that I am giving myself an ulcer trying to figure out a way to get a job. The reality suckfest is that I haven't had a real (paying) job since 2004. Then I went back to school, then we moved aross the country, then I worked for like 1 day at a temp agency, then I got pregnant. So when the job application asks for work experience, I just want to sit down and cry.
Is it this hard for every over-educated mom who chose to stay at home with their kid? they are punished when they try to re-enter the work force? And I have lowered my standards quite a bit at this point. I just won't work for below minimum wage, because that is what we are paying for school so we need to break even right?
Other than that, things are either right as rain, or in the absolute shitter.
E is in a massive NO stage. He is impossible. I guess it is the transition from school. He has started biting and whipping his toys. He is getting increasingly sophisticated in his reasoning.
In fact he just threw a die-cast airplane at my back. I look like a battered wife.
The more "me" time I get, the more "me" time I want.

TTAPMOT (Things that are pissing me off today)

-No milk for my morning tea. grrrrr
-I forgot about some very nice strawberries and they spoiled before I could eat them.
-E is being Captain Wasteful with food.
-having my head so far up my ass that I didn't even realize there was a total solar eclipse today. I am usually all over that shit.
-willfully, albeit accidentally, infesting my bathroom with beetles. The first week of June, We were on an outdoor adventure. We were at the Folger Estate, it is a very cool place. I am a bit of a collector. While there I found a buckeye. These things are cool looking. They have a really nice weight and feel about them. I thought it neat and took it home, put in in my bathroom as a bit of "found art." Maybe a week ago these little black beetles started showing up, two or three at a time. They were slow moving and I would just wash them down the drain. Last night there were maybe a dozen of them and I was getting a bit freaked out. Where the eff where these coming from? I lifted up the buckeye, (after a few hours of racking my brain that is) it felt strangely hollow and there was a little pile of dust underneath it. I cracked it open and the thing was filled with these little black beetles that looked like big, non-jumping, slow fleas. GROSS CITY. They must have hatched and gone looking for water.
-Ongoing month-long headache.
-Headache causing me to forget everything. I made hard-boiled eggs for our mid-morning snack, put them in a pot in the sink to cool and just found them 4 hours later. Went to grocery store to get milk, forgot to buy J transit pass for the month, the main reason I went to the Safeway and not the nice local marker, duh!
-ran out of cat food. I am currently hating the cats for pissing on my stupidly expensive beanbag chair. I can't get the smell out. have used pounds of baking soda and managed to spill vinegar just about everywhere in the process of trying to clean piss, now house smells like douche.
-E dropped the hummingbird feeder on the rug - Sugar water everywhere! I overreacted and made him cry.
-J told me he was going to get out of work at 3 pm today, called a little while ago to tell me- Just Kidding. He has too much work to do and won't be home until after 6 pm.
-MIL's 20 year old cat died and she is despondent. He died last weekend and she is calling me crying almost everyday. Sympathy running thin, I am a hateful bitch, but at this point I don't understand why people even keep cats at pets. (see above)

God I am a fucking picnic.

Goodbye Last Shred of Dignity

So I made a new friend. She is cool and her son is very close in age to E.

We went to the Bay Area Discovery Museum with them on our first big play date. What a fun place. It is over in Marin and therefore filled with "Marin Moms." Women with perfect hair, nails done, outfits just so, looking perfectly dignified. Scowling at me in horror that my son is covered in strawberry Popsicle stains and my sunscreen self-application looks a lot like Heath's joker.

Actually his hair looks better.

I take E to the bathroom. Well of course my tampon leaked and of course E was right in the front row taking notes. He shouts, "Mommy! you pooped you pants!" I hear giggles from outside, I try to just ignore him and not make a big deal, you know no reaction, no big whoop, right? E is dancing around the stall (we were in the big one) shouting "mommy pooped her pants, mommy pooped her pants, mommy pooped her pants!" I walked out of the stall with my head down.

When J comes home he always asks E what we did that day. The answer is always,"I don't know." Because you know, naps erase the memory. Not that day.

"Mommy pooped her pants." is what we did on Wednesday, in case you were curious.

I am still not sure which is more traumatising that your mom poops her pants, or that your mom bleeds out of a mysterious hole that sometimes she stuffs with a white mouse with a long tail. I need more privacy.

Perspective

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time.

-McCullers Carson, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.