class reunion

i keep getting emails from people i haven't seen in almost a decade. i went to a stupid baptist highschool 20 years ago and i never want to see any of those people again, so this is kind of like the class reuinion i never had.

more stuff that people without kids can't relate to

my 8 year old kid joined the cub scouts today. i didn't want him to because i have some kind of stick up my ass about stuff like that. it's stupid really when i think about it. in my crowd, cub scouts were geeks, but my kids aren't growing up in the same rural, farming, hillbilly socioeconomic strata that i did. it's about camping and having fun and, let's face it, my strange child could use a little more socialization.

that's one pitfall of parenting i want to avoid - subjecting my kids to my own fussy little dogmas, in particular, my severe mistrust of organized groups or anything having even the smallest bit of religious affiliation. i missed out on a lot of stuff because i was "too cool" for it. i don't have to worry anymore. all illusions of being too cool or even cool at all are gone. so if my kids want to join cub scouts, that's fine with me. if they want to try out for the football team, i say go for it. if they want to go to church, i'll let 'em. i hope i've learned that lesson from my own childhood - shoving a bunch of rigid dogma at a kid is a good way to make him or her reactionary rather than contemplative.

fond memories of the queerdaddys

what a surprise to see a comment from a former east lansing rock god, we'll call him bryce. the word "former" refers to the east lansing part, not the rock god part. he is now rockin' the hills of missoula, montana and bravely leading the society of vinyl preservationists with his killertree label, which still distributes a fine varietey of hard-to-find vinyl delights.

i hardly knew him when he first invited me to join his groovy grunge band rendering suns after seeing me play a show with my then band, crotch. and why did he ask me? was it those mean rhythym chops i banged out on my old hagstrom guitar? was it my fine artist's sensibility? no way! it was because i was a chick who held my stockings up with duct tape! i proposed that the name, rendering suns, sounded like a grateful dead cover band and the crotch drummer, randy, said it reminded him of boiling fat. (as in rendering fat off bones) the young, straight-edge, head-shorn drummer of rendering suns didn't care about the comparison to fat, but the mere possibility that anybody thought we were a grateful dead cover band was enough to make him declare that we had to change our name immediately. i can't remember all the names we pondered, but queerdaddys was the winner.

oh, i am laughing so hard right now as i picture bryce playing a show in a rainbow striped clown suit my wizened, old grandmother made as a halloween costume for yet another sister of mine. it was too short, so he had the top part down around his waist, playing bare chested with a polka-dot, bozo-styled ruffled collar around his neck. too bad those weren't the days of video phones.

i'm sure bryce has many fond memories of me too, like messing all the songs up and having to write the chord changes on our set list because i couldn't remember them.

it sure is nice to hear from old friends again. everybody seems to still be out there rockin', except me. the hagstrom got broken in two pieces during a drunken indoor game of football, and my handmade dauphin classical guitar that i saved all my pizza delivery tips to buy when i was 19, also got broken into two pieces just recently when my 3 year old child took it out of its case and tried to play it by stomping on it. this child did live to age 4 and is almost 5 now, but that pretty much ended my guitar playing even though i've still got one lonely guitar left. i keep it in a case that locks. every once in a while, i unlock the case and take it out and play my favorite queerdaddy song, speedpigs. i never missed the chord changes on that one. regrettably, i no longer have any queerdaddy demo tapes. if any of you grizzled old punkers out there has one, send me a copy!

this really is pretty boring

the few glasses of wine i drink at night, usually two modest ones, (slightly less than half full and only drunk to get my daily serving of antioxidant, cancer-fighting super phytochemicals) help to make this blog more entertaining. now that i am taking my 5k training seriously, however, i have notcied that it is easier to run without a hangover or alcohol induced dehydration. so i am cutting back. now that i am cutting back, i've noticed that this blog is indeed boring. i'm getting tired of it again. it is lame to be a drunk old lady blabbering on and on about whatever. i probably have some extra phytochemicals stored up for a while anyway, so i might take a break until after i finish my race. maybe i will publish my training log like my sister does. (instead of publishing my drinking log)

i ran the course of the 5K today. it's the first time i have ever run outside in the real world away from my hamster wheel. the real ground is not nearly so squishy as my shock absoring treadmill deck. also there's no display to tell me how fast i'm going or help to pace myself. i tried to use my watch, but quickly gave it up. i got so tired i had to walk three times. but alas, i finished in 30 minutes and 7 seconds. i can make the timer on my watch work, at least.

my husband took the kids on the 1 mile course. they did well, but he looked a little worse for wear. i drank only one modest glass of red wine last night because i had planned to run today, so mitch took up the slack. anyway, we are back into the grind of being responsible adults for now, so there will be no more crazy hangovers or storied binges for a while at least.

sorry, the rants return

i forgot to address this point, a friend asked me why i care so much about all those dead kids in lebanon and iraq, but rarely rant on and on for the dead darfurians and other african victims of violence and general assholeishness. am i kind of racist? maybe i am. i just picture a western-styled kid, much like my own, with educated parents who love him and live in a nice house like my own western-type house, then suddenly a big ass bomb falls on that nice house and all his educated family is dead in one second. the neighbors don't come over to help because their educated families are dead too. does that happen to children in darfur? i'm sure it does. but for some reason it hits so close to home with me to compare what the people who lost everything in lebanon had before the fighting began with what would happen to me in a similar situation. everything makes me sad, but when i see somebody on the news who looks like me pulling a kid out of rubble that looks like my kid if he were dead, that just gets to me. racist or not, it makes me so angry that our stupid president who never had to pay a fucking bill in his life is mortgaing everybody's future on something so stupid and unjustified as the iraq war. (even though i was talking about lebanon, not iraq)

the wind in the willows...

ok, my husband is asleep and two bottles of wine are now empty. i want to talk and mitch is kind and nice but he wants to watch the news. we are quiet as we drink too much and listen to kieth olberman blast the prez a new one, and it seems he could use a new one anyway, from the impaction of his current policy.

is anybody there?

recovery

ok. i had to stop running at night because it kept me up until 4 am. when you can't sleep, there's nothing to do but worry and drink too much. so now i am running in the mornings. if you're going to get a hangover and make your kids late for school, it should be for something worthwhile that has a good story attached to it. not because you read too many back issues of science. so i had to take a day off from running, and i pretty much slept all the time and took some vitamins. i ran this morning, and i felt pretty good and wide awake all day, but now i am dead on my feet.

i have been worrying about going back to work. my job is going to be a real job, not some kind of impalpable research position like i have only ever known. and it will be fairly high pressure. even though i'll be working for my husband, he'll fire me if i suck, and he won't even say he's sorry. well, maybe he will, but i will still be out of a job.

anyway, this weekend we are going to practice the 5k, and i'll see how i do. all this running keeps my mind from wandering into issues of self-competency. the prospect of a job has also cured my late night sessions of political analysis. that's at least positive, although my friend of the "time is your weakness" blog found my political comments "hysterical". he will have to read the funny papers now. there, i finally put a link in a post. if you look back through fred's stuff, you can eventually find the link to my crappy old 90s pseudo-punk band.

post script for 9/11

p.s. i forgot to be specially depressed today over september 11. there are so many ominous depressing things these days, that i guess it slipped my mind until i read my old friend fred's blog "time is your weakness" i do remember what i was doing that day. i was taking kid #1 to the doctor and kid #2 was not yet here upon the earth. i was driving and listening to some stupid "new music" station, when the retarded, college-age dejay woman interrupted a song to say, "uh, i just heard that, like, an airplane just hit the twin towers in new york or something. isn't that, like... weird? like, i think something is going on, but like, nobody knows what..."

when i got home, i turned on CNN and watched it all day. my kid was only 3, but we had NPR and CNN on all the time. he saw the airplane crashing over and over. all the kids at our politically correct pre-school were knocking down block towers with airplanes for weeks. crazy crazy world.

the freight train that lived in my head today

my kids were late to school today because i slept through my alarm! i've been running 3 miles on the tread mill (or turd mill as my kids cleverly say) every night to get ready for the dino dash, msu museum's benefit 5K run on october 1st. it is the first race i will have ever run, and i want to finish it in under 30 minutes. (my sister is 7 years older than me and can run a 5K in 22 minutes!! i can't do that. i must not be old enough yet.)

so after running, i blogged and drank too much wine and stayed up until 4 am reading old papers trying to cram some of the knowledge i used to have back into my head. suddenly i realized my 4 year old son was shaking me while the alarm beeped merrily away in the backgorund and a run-away freight train slammed through my brain. "don't we have school today, mom?" he said. ow ow ow ow ow ow ow i said. then i looked at the clock that read 8:20, about the time we leave for the bus stop.

i jumped up and ran downstairs to take some aspirin. "we're going to be a little late today," i said. i was so ferociously hung over. After the first crop of aspirin slowed down the freight train, a microscopic expedition of ice climbers got off it and stomped on my brain with their crampooned boots and climbed their way up my brain stem with tiny ice-axes. another round of aspirin slowed them down for a while, but they were remarkably persistent throughout the day. i spent the day laying around and drinking water. now i am finally starting to perk up just in time to do it all over again. i am getting the blogging part done first, then the running and i am going to skip the wine altogether.

mitch will be home wednesday so i will get back into a regular routine then. plus, two sets of ears are more likely to hear the alarm. bye for now. the kids are almost asleep so it's time to run.

a new day dawns and the gravy train is over

well, things are looking up, i guess. mitch got a big fat "new jobs" type of grant for michigan, so i will now be going back to work. the days of bon bons, soap operas and tears over dead kids in lebanon and iraq etc.... are over. i suppose the sadness is still there because i know if i had grown up in one of those societies, i would be right there at the bottom of the socio-economic heap and in the cross hairs of random violence. but i'm here by my boot straps, so my tasks at hand involve looking out for #1 and #1's progeny. so i've got a good job making molecules, and that's what i'm good at doing. and my kids have new shoes.

i've heard through the grapevine that east lansing hardcore's poet laureate, "joyner", is back in the usa after chasing his soul to europe for a summer. i still have to check out his "peacock throne" blog. if i were any kind of a real human being, i would make that a link, but alas, i fall flat on that too. anyway, i must say that it is a comfort in my old age to keep in touch with my dearest friends. by the way, does anyone know what ever happened to doc dart, now known as "26" these days?

is there anything else to say? who knows. mitch is in san fran now for a meeting and i am a few glasses of wine down the road so it seems like the case is closed. i think of all sorts of things i could write, but when i do get here to write it, all is forgotten. plus i still can't figure out the stupid spell check button. is it because i have a mac that it doesn't work?? oh torment to my soul. i don't feel like proof reading this post so what is here is what you get!