Bad CAR-ma

Some no good dishonest suv-drivin' (e.g. the high location of the dents) person side swiped my Jetta today in the parking lot and didn't even leave a note. So I stand out in the rain to file a police report and I call Geico and they are really great at handling my claim, and the guy on the phone with me is so empathetic and sensitive. Now I feel like I could be one of those people telling my story on their commercials -- who they'd hire an actor for.
"Hi my name is Heather and some dumb shit side swiped my car and didn't even leave a note."
actor: OH GOD my beautiful black New Jetta is toast!
"I was upset and it was raining, but I called Geico and the sweet little guy on the phone made me feel so much better. He said the call right before mine was a woman in Alabama with the same problem."
actor: (singing) It's a rainy night in Georgia and I feel like it's raining all over the woooorld.

If I were a cat.

I have always said that if reincarnation is possible, and even considering inherant risks, I'd like to come back one day as a cat. A male cat, because I don't ever want to go through any sort of c-section type surgery again. I'd like to be short hair, because I know I'd have to lick myself to keep clean, and too much hair in the throat can be an awful experience for a kitty. If you have cats, you've no doubt heard the god-awful sounds that emit from a cat whose throat is full of fur; kind of a cough, hack, wheeze, gasping sort of sound. I'd like to have rich owners who can afford to feed me the food that comes individually packed and looks like something that humans could potentially eat for dinner in lieu of grilled cheese or p,b, & j. I wouldn't want a collar because, let's face it, they're confining, and if I was gonna crap in a neighbor's pine straw or flower bed, would I really want them to read my name tag and be able to shout my name out loud as they chase me up the street? If my owner was mean to me, I'd do what my brother-in-law's cat did -- shit right in the sink that he brushes his teeth over. Wake up and smell the feces man....that'll teach you to adopt a freakin' stray cat off the street whose ass smells like she's from the lower part of town if you know what I mean. And if I were a cat, I'd spend my days lying in the sunny spot on the carpet or the couch or someone's favorite chair, and I'd do my best to shed there to mark that spot as my own. I'd be a one person kind of cat I think, and I'd curl up in her lap every night and bury my kitty face in the crook of her arm and purr like an angel. She'd whisper sweet nothings to me and give me treats and brush my hair. During the nights I'd frolic around the neighborhood or the house and get in to everything I possibly could, and I suppose I'd kill a thing or two and proudly deliver the corpses to different doorsteps. Perhaps I'd meet a companion kitty and we'd prowl through my terriory together, swishing our tails happily ever after.

Cats have the good life, for real. Many times as I have drug myself out of bed to go to work for another day I have wished I could lay in the sunny spot with my cat all day with not a care in the world except getting up to pee and eat and drink. And I guess those cussed hairballs. But I could take a hairball every now an then if it meant I had no mortgage and no job and I could spend the days doing whatever I wanted to do. Hiss at the mailman, arch my back, scare the kids, whatever. And if my owner called me some silly name in some fake nice voice, I could sit under her chair and let out a big tuna fart and listen to her blame everyone in the house but me. :)

I know why Davinci cut off his ear.

What does a girl have to do to get some sleep around here? The child has come downstairs and asked for something to drink two nights in a row, and of course when she does she wakes the dog, who then wants to go out to pee, and when the dog gets excited, so do the kitties, and the whole house is up at one in the morning, or at four, take your pick. I have heard that the less sleep you get the more creative you become, and I've also heard the less sleep you get the more depressed you become. Who was that genius that cut off his ear? Davinci? Did he have a kid, a puppy, 2 kittens, and an outdoor attack cat? Probably not, but it's worth further investigation. I know nothing about the man except that he knew how to paint, but I'll be willing to bet he had a pet 'something' that woke his ass up at night day after day, wee morning hour after wee morning hour, until he finally couldn't take it anymore and figured he wouldn't hear the freaking noise if he cut his ear off. People will do strange things to get some sleep. Of course, I'll bet the first time he laid his knobby sore ear down onto his probably hard pillow his ass woke back up. That's all I'm saying. I know why he did it. It wasn't a good idea, but I know why he did it. To get some freakin' Zzzzzzzs.

Butt Sniffin'

It's funny how addicted I am to the internet, my email, and recently this little blog o mine. My nighttime lack of internet this past week was very stressful, so in some ways I'm glad I was tired and grumpy from work so I didn't have to pace around the house muttering expletives about my cable company.
Tonight I'll call "stinky alert night." Every hour or so my child, who has quite obviously taken a break from the potty training that we started almost two weeks ago, thought it would be funny to tell us that she had a stinky. We asked her over and over, do you have a stinky? Or do you just have a froggy (which somehow became our family term for passing gas)? She would smile and point to her butt and say, "smell it."
I never ever in a million years thought before I had a child that I would be a butt sniffer. I thought butt sniffing was only for dogs and cats and other wild things with small brains and fur. But I have become a world class butt sniffer, and so has my husband Hal. The other day he walked into the livingroom, having just risen from a weekend afternoon nap, and immediately started sniffing the air around him, his face contorting into a grimace. Oooooh, I smell a stinky. He looks at me. Who me, I can't smell a thing! (I'd been stuffy for weeks - damn allergy to the dog.) And then he asks the question. Sarah, do you have a stinky or did you have a froggy? Sarah shakes her head yes. Then he seperates the questions and asked them again. Stinky? She shakes no. Froggy? Yeah daa-ee. I had a froggy. Then she goes hopping across the carpet. Ribbet, ribbet! So he goes and does it anyway. Grabs her up and sniffs her butt. Looks inside the diaper. Yep, just a froggy Sweetie!

Then there are the farting kittens. Two weeks after I adopted the dog during a minor bout of depression, I saw on a listserv the little orage tabby of my dreams - for adoption. I've always wanted an orange tabby. When we drive 35 miles to the farm, there are six of them and we wind up taking two because we think they'll be happier if we get two. We love them; they are really great. As if we didn't have enough things producing poop, these little guys make lots of it, but they are great with the litter box. Never any accidents, that is, unless you count the big potted peace lily whose soft dirt wildly attracts them. But when they first moved in, we didn't realize that little cats have so much gas. They'd be under our chair and we'd smell something awful and then we'd be over sniffing Sarah's butt, asking her if she had some kind of mega tuna stinky. These little kitties who barely weighed a pound a piece were producing some whopper farts. They were turn on the ceiling fan and run out of the room laughing histerically kind of farts. I'd accuse Hal and he'd accuse me. It was you! Yuck! No, it was you! It wasn't me!

So because we have, as Hal calls her, "the poopin'-ist dog on the street," and the fartin feline duo, and the toddler who teases us with the new smell my butt comments, we have decided to install a wonderful new invention. The Lysol wall mounted automatic mist air freshener. Every nine minutes we get a quick snort of lavender scented air just to remind our nostrils that there's more to life than "elimination."

Go to sleep (because you're bored)

Wonder what I could write about if I went downtown every Friday night and just bar-hopped (without drinking)? Anthology on Athen's alcohol problem?
My blogging abilities have been severely hampered the last few days, as I have no working cable at home. That's gonna be fixed soon so everyone be patient. I know you've been checking! Just kidding, seriously. If one person other than myself is reading this, thanks. Send it to all your friends. I wanna be a famous writer. FAMOUS. WRITER. No day job. Just writing and musing and speculating and being. I want people to read my thoughts. Is that weird? Seems weird. The fact that I'm already thinking about writing a second book seems a bit over the top too...like I'm assuming that the first one will make the press. We shall see.
This week is stressful - work is starting to get busy. That's one of the reasons I wanted to finish the book before August. Still working on the name changes. My best thinking and writing is late at night or in the middle of the night so this afternoon attempt is boring I know, but I felt like I had to give all of you loyal followers some kind of update... :)
Here's a song I wrote for Sarah: I sang it to her for probably 30 minutes last night. I stopped and with her fingers in her mouth and her copy (soft white cloth attachment thingy) in her hand she said, "mommy, do it again." This produced an awesome mommy moment. Yes.

Go to sleep, go to sleep
Dream a sweet, sweet dream
Go to sleep, go to sleep
Dream a sweet dream

Nobody loves you the way that I do
Nobody loves you the way I love you

Go to sleep, go to sleep
I will be here
Go to sleep, go to sleep
I'll be right here

Walk on a cloud with a silver star
Walk on a cloud with a silver star

Nobody loves you the way that I do
Nobody loves you the way I love you

Dead man (almost) walking

Sunday morning at around 1:45 AM I'm headed home from a visit to my cousin's house and I'm sleepy but I've got Evanescence cranked up loud on my stereo and I'm thinking about everything that's going on in my life when all of a sudden, and I mean this was super strange, a dude in a white tee shirt walks right out in front of my car. I saw him coming about two seconds before I would have hit him but I had time to stop because I had just gotten off the bypass and was going to start breaking for a turn. He walked right out in front of me and I actually had to wait for him to stagger out of the way of my car. He had NO idea that he almost got hit by my car. I knew cats had 9 lives, but people? It really freaked me out, and I sat there watching him for at least ten seconds or more before I started driving again. Just thought I'd share.

So sue me Bubba.

Okay, some good things happened today. Number one is that I took my last three dollars and forty one cents and got the combo at Dunkin Donuts and gave the kid another donut this morning and she now knows beyond all shadow of a doubt that I am in fact the coolest mommy ever. Of course, the time out she got tonight for pitching a screaming fit on the potty might have erased the aura of the donut...don't know for sure.

The doggie I'm trying to find a home for is right now underneath my feet shreading a little foam football I got while I worked at Clemson. It's keeping her from jumping in my lap and slobbering all over my favorite sweats so I'll let her continue to shread and I'll pick up bits of foamy orange and white in the morning. The sacrifices I make for this blog and my future fame!

I started the process of changing the names in my manuscript today, you know, to protect the guilty. This was a disturbing thing. I find that I don't like creating falsities. I mean, yeah there will be that little disclaimer at the beginning of the book, but I can't stand reading something when I know it's not the person's real name. My name of course will be correct, and if my family promises not to shoot me, their names will be correct, but most others will have to be changed. What have lawsuits done to America?! And then there was the task of trying to come up with the "right" false name. I found myself wanting to give stupid characters names like Bubba. No really, just kidding...but it was strange. I couldn't decide on each one if the new name I came up with sounded authentic enough. I went on the Social Security website and researched popularity of names and tried to find a real name that would have been given to the person in the same year he/she was born. I went on baby naming websites to search for cool sounding names I wouldn't have otherwise thought of. I even pulled out the phonebook to look for authentic Southern surnames. I mean, I put a lot of effort into this. Who knows..? Might be a movie one day and who'd want to play a guy named Bubba or a girl named Jonnie Sue? The real names will always be the coolest. Even as a novice author I've already found something that irritates me. Changing the truth.

Jill the rat terrier and some reading I've done.

I just finished reading Ariel Gore's How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, and let me say, it's a definite kick in the toosh -- a word of encouragement for aspiring writers like myself. There are no charts, graphs, tables, or how to's in her book, just good solid narrative about what it is like to be a writer, about how to handle yourself in the lit world, and how not to give up when you can paper your house with rejection letters. I learned a few things, many less things than I thought I would learn buying and reading a "how to" book, but hearing about what it's really like trying to get published was the most valuable thing this book offered. Also, something I'd never thought of or considered was in here: the whole idea of self publishing and promoting my work. Not that I have a whole lot of work done. I've had two articles published in Athena Magazine and I've written a manuscript for a book I've titled Consciousness Lost. That's about the sum of it. Unless you count that first little story I wrote back when I was a thirteen year old in awe of Jill the rat terrier who had single handedly given birth to six teeny little puppies. It was Jill and her pups that convinced me that some things were worth writing down. So if you're aspiring to write or get published, pick up a copy of this book. It's good stuff.

Other than that, I'm still sick with this funk that I think I got from being allergic to the dog. If you want to adopt a not quite house trained Austrailian cattle dog puppy who loves to fetch and who's just as cute as she can be, lemme know. I've got one. My sinus passages will thank you. I'll even throw in the money for her spay.

I emailed someone at UGA Press today hoping for the opportunity to come peddle my manuscript. I phoned someone at Hill Street Press for an appointment two days ago. Nothing yet. Nada.

I wonder if I should dress up in a pink tutu and gorilla mask and stand on the corner downtown reading excerpts from my manuscript? Ariel Gore did. Worked for her.

Reviews!

Two of my great (and truthful) friends read the manuscript and they loved it. Two rave reviews! I'm really psyched. It is good to have a person say that it felt complete, that it was compelling, that it answered questions for them. Made both of them cry even! I didn't expect that at all...

Excuse me while I choke on a cough drop.

Yuck, yuck, yuck I am sick. Ever since I adopted the doggie I've had some level of sinus trouble and I never have sinus trouble. Today's problem is the same as yesterday's and the day before: sinus infection, round 2. The first one was in June and it lasted the whole month.

If anyone out there knows how to get my memoir published, let me know. It's damn good if I say so myself. I wrote my author bio and synopsis today. The author bio is more humorous than anything, but the synopsis I really had no clue about, so it's two and a half pages when it's supposed to only be one: according to the Hill Street Press website. I'm going to hope it's acceptable. Perhaps I should bake cookies and bring them when I drop all my stuff off at their office. Perhaps I should walk in on my knees with my notebook and the cookies. I'm trying hard not to be vested in this, to let go of the outcome, but I don't think I'd be the next great star of literature if I did that. Doesn't it have to cause angst to move you forward in some way? The rest of my life sure as hell has. And this is why I was able to write this stunningly complelling memoir. It's a cross between James Frey and Augusten Burroughs. I think. Or maybe I just assume that because they are the only memoirists I've read lately. Not that I'm as good as they are. I think they are both amazing writers. They're also freakin rich, which is why I need to find a publisher for the book. See how everything goes back to the book?

I'm gonna go choke on a cough drop now. Peace.

cool donut mommy

So the other day on the way to school (daycare) and my work (college) I decide that I need coffee. Our usual stop is at Starbucks, my former place of part-time employment, and my one time obsession. They are great at marketing. Anyway, I decide that I am wearing a pink shirt and brown pants and the Dunkin Donuts cup will match my outfit better (seriously, that is how I decided to go there that morning) and I also know that they have a "combo" that is a coffee and two, not one but two donuts, so I can share with my little 2 year old co-pilot.

So we pull into the DD and drive up through the drive thru and I order the combo.

$3.41 ma'am.

I give the woman my money and she gives me the caffeine and sugar and Sarah sees the bag and immediately starts to whine.

Mommee! I want the donut! Gimmee the donut!

I get out of the drive thru and pluck the donut out of the bad using that handy tissue paper stuff they grab the donuts out of the case with. I hand her the donut with the tissue paper and as I do this my arm reaches as far back as it can go around my seat and I do my best to look at her, look at the road, and drive my five speed manual transmission Jetta to school without crashing and spewing bits of car parts, glass and such, all over the road.

Here ya go Baby...now tell me, am I not the coolest Mommy ever? Huh? A donut before school? Not every kids gets that! I'm a cool Mommy!

And I really catch myself believing this. I am the coolest mommy on the freaking planet right now because I just gave my kid a sugary oily fatty donut and she's not even three. And it's not even eight AM.

She does not say yes or tell me anything that might make my head swell further. All I get is: Mommy! I got a donut!

Five miles later Sarah has polished off the thing and I know this because she shouts Mommy I want anuder one!

I look in the rearview mirror and she's got sugary donut residue all over her face and hands. Little bits of white stuff sticking to her face. She's checking out her fingers by pinching them together and then noticing that they don't pull apart so easy. They're sticky.

I test my Gumby skill a second time when I reach around to give her a wipe, or wipy as we call them.

Wipe your face and hands Baby, get the sticky stuff off.

I notice that she's still holding the crumpled up donut wrapper and I tell her to hand that to me so she can better use the wipe and clean herself up. I think I'm doing her a favor.

I reach around behind me again, trying to move my hand within reach of her hands.

Hand me the wrapper Sarah. I look at her in the rear view mirror to see whether or not my hand is close enough. Now, at this point, the coolest mommy in the world has only one hand on the wheel, and zero eyes on the road. Not too cool, but hey, I'm trying to minimize the mess and do the kid a favor.

She looks at me, looks at my hand, which is actually quite close, and then gives me the you'd better say it look. Mommy, say leeze! Say leeze Mommy.

The kid knows her manners because I have taught them to her. Now however, is not the time to test Mommy.

Sarah, Please give me the wrapper.

Mommy, say leeze. Her eyes look up slightly and then glare right back at me in that, boy you'd better say it or else I'm gonna take you back to where you came from look.

Sarah I have to have this hand to drive! I give up and pull my arm back around enough to shift the gear and straighten the wheel.

Sarah. Give Mommy the wrapper please. Back around goes my arm.

She gives me the wrapper. She wipes her face and hands and throws the wipy down on the floorboard of the car.

The world resumes its madness, we keep driving, more safely even, and even though she's taken several swipes at her face with a wipe there's still a huge white donut sugar crumb right up underneath her left eye.

When we get to school we are nineteen minutes past the time when they stop serving breakfast but that doesn't matter because my kid has already had breakfast.

Wasn't that donut good Baby? I get her out of the car and snatch that crumb off her face so they won't think I'm a total failure of a mother.

Yeah Mommy.

I'm a cool mommy right?

Yeah, you cool Mommy!

There you have it. I'm cool and I have good manners.

I can't believe it.

I have written a memoir. 50,492 words to be exact. To publish or not to publish? Is it even worth reading? I think so...has all the right elements...sex, sin, childhood trauma, abandonment, Viagra. Whatever.
I'm on sinus medication because I've got that freaking sinus infection again. Don't share antibiotics. If you do, then you won't have enough to kill all of the little bacteria fuckers and they'll multiply and come back to get you again.
I'm in a strange funk of a mood and probably should not be writing but my fingers need the exercise. Who knows when they'll need to churn out fifty thousand something more words within a month's time?
Blah.