I think, therefore I blog

I have not clogged the blogosphere with my random thoughts in quite some time. The universe is apparently unhappy with this, so I am posting random thoughts in the order in which they come.
My children have too much Halloween candy and too much of it is ending up in my mouth instead of theirs.
I was hounded at work to log 40 hours a week, but now that I am asking for 40 hours' worth of work, there isn't enough for me to do. Hello? Couldn't we have left well enough alone?
I edited two lessons on Hamlet today and realized how much I miss reading and studying literature for the joy of doing so.
I ate soup from a can and it wasn't bad.
My brother and sister-in-law are at a challenging point and if I were a praying person, I would pray. Instead, even thinking about praying for something makes me feel weird inside, so I will ask the universe and the primary unmoved mover (hello Aristotle) to cut them some slack.
I ran for 25 minutes today and it felt great. Take that, stupid hip and piriformis.
The house needs a new furnace and I don't want to make the calls to get the contractors to come out and estimate. It is all so much work. I wish I could delegate it. But if I do it won't get done. And we will be cold. And I don't like being cold.
I don't know what I'm fixing for dinner tonight. My children probably won't eat it anyway.
Glee is on tonight. Yeay! Jane Lynch was on Fresh Air this afternoon and she was candid and funny and generally a pleasure to listen to. And she didn't come out to her parents until she was 31. I can't imagine.
Heroes is getting worse. End it already, people.
It's dark in my corner of the office and I can't be bothered to turn on the light.
I'm feeling lazy.
I don't want to pack. Can't someone else do it for me?
I didn't vote yesterday. I know that I will be vilified for this, so I'm keeping mum to the outside world. I didn't know enough about the candidates and so I didn't make time. A Republican won the governor's race in VA, but with term limits, I don't see how it matters so much. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.
I blew and bagged leaves for nearly three hours this weekend before taking the kids out to trick or treat. The ache in my biceps has finally gone away. Guess it's time to do it again.
Our credit card bill was way way way too much this month, thanks to plane tickets to England for three, a root canal, a crown insertion, dentist visits for the kids, groceries, gas, and some random shopping. I'm starting to wonder if I swear off buying anything except foodstuffs and replacement articles of clothing, if that would be a good thing. Could I do it? Retail therapy has been helpful for me, since it keeps me from stuffing my face. But I need to find another outlet. Already running... can't do more of that yet. Writing! Ah yes, the forgotten art for which I have no time. It's NaNoWriMo and I haven't even thought about it. Has it really been two years since I wrote my novel? It's languishing in a drawer somewhere.
Legion is filming, doing what he has wanted to do his entire teenage and adult life (other than marry his beloved). Curbgirl is trying to make sense of the economic situation we all struggle with. JR is out of prison, thankfully, but can't seem to get herself back into society. My Facebook chums are alternately dealing with flu, behaviorally-challenged children, reductions in the workforce, bliss in religious life, and wonder at the comings of the natural world (high temps in Puerto Rico and Florida, low temps in Northern Ohio, snow in the upper Midwest, and ever-changing temps on the eastern seaboard--see above note re: flu).
I have to make arrangements to get the chimney inspected in the new house.
I wish I had a patron so I could write and not worry about money.
I aspire to Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing, even though it is daunting for others to insert themselves into. I just ended a sentence with a preposition--bad, bad me.
Time to go make the donuts. I mean dinner.

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

This was a phenomenal read. Written by Peter Manseau, a Georgetown professor who knows his way around the balance of narrative and description, the book intersperses the lifestory of Itsik Malpesh, an unwilling immigrant to the United States from his native Russia, with that of a young man in the present charged with translating the former's memoirs.

The characters are recognizable but not "stock." Malpesh is blown, as the feathers in the town's goosedown factory are, across the ocean into a sweatshop. He remains a poet at heart and in mind, scribbling rhymed verses at will on whatever he can find, pining for a lost love and ignoring the reality of the world around him. He stubbornly clings to his native Yiddish instead of learning Hebrew or English as the world around him dictates.

Several times, I had to look at the jacket to verify that this was indeed fiction and not a memoir. The story, while incredulous, is realistic. The plot moves--not at breakneck speed, as in so many of today's "thrillers"--allowing you to stop along the way to savor a bit of description, a paragraph of philosophy, or a historical incident that lingers in the collective memory of most tribal members.

Highly recommend this one--check it out!

La France, vous me manquez

Just finished Almost French by Sarah Turnbull. I can relate so well to the memoir of being an outsider in France (although in Lyon, not Paris) and feeling clueless as to why the French would stare in the street if I laughed too loud, or talked too much, or didn't iron my jeans.

Turnbull's experiences, to be sure, are uniquely hers, as she moves through a relationship with a Frenchman that ultimately leads to marriage. But anyone who has marveled at French women's relationship with their tiny dogs, dinner parties where people talk endlessly about esoteric topics and don't care who you are, why clochards are part of the national brick and mortar, and how bureaucratic red tape is enough to make even the most patient Francophone lose their cool will enjoy Turnbull's memoir. It makes me want to return to France; yet at the same time, I thank my stars I'm not navigating cool Parisian social customs on a daily basis.

Balloons

At 5:47 a.m. I discovered our son in our bed, tossing and turning and crying about "balloons."

"Balloons, balloons, balloons!" he cried, with increasing intensity.

My husband and I tried to rouse him from the semi-sleep state to find out what was causing his chagrin.

No avail.

In my half-aware dreamless haze, a variety of scenarios bubbled to surface.

Was he trapped inside a giant balloon, unable to speak or get our attention?
Perhaps a giant balloon was taking him away from us, basket or not, and the separation was killing us both.
Maybe a balloon popped, suddenly, shattering the silence of his otherwise peaceful Nod.

Finally, he fell back to sleep, face down, sprawled with his lovey, snoring loudly, back heaving slightly.
I relaxed and slipped back below the surface of consciousness.

Later, after showers and breakfasts and fights over televisions being on or off, I managed to grasp him in my arms.

"What was that all about?" I asked. "The balloons."

He looked quizzically at my face, sheepishly cast his glance aside, and then smiled.
"My balloon," he said, pronouncing its sentence, "was missing."

I stroked his thick brown hair and played with the cowlick that had arisen from sleeping so hard. "What balloon?"

"My balloon!" he insisted.

"It was a dream, sweetheart," I said, readying myself to explain the difference between the dreams we have while we are awake and those that plague us while asleep.

"I had a balloon," he said, "at Gramma and Poppy's."

In mid-August.

A balloon from a burger joint (in which neither child opted for a burger, of course) that had lingered in the house until we caught our plane back to our new city. It didn't make the trip with us. To me--one less object to pack. To him--a treasured possession left behind.

I suppressed a laugh. "Oh, that balloon."

"Yes. Where is it?" He really wanted to know.

In a landfill somewhere. Or shriveled to a quarter of its size, stuck behind a shelf in a forgotten nook in his ersatz-bedroom. Or passed along to another child.

I didn't know what to say, any more than I knew why the missing balloon had caused him so much angst. The sunny yellow sphere entered and exited his life within 48 hours, yet he asks after it, with the same intention that I email an old friend whose husband just had a stroke--checking in, taking a pulse, ensuring that she's still there on the fringes of my life.

"Um... probably in the trash," I said, trying to make my voice carefree. "Balloons don't last forever."

My husband entered the kitchen and heard the last line or two of our rushed interaction before heading out the door to school. "Yes, and Mommy and Daddy need to sleep tonight. So you need to sleep in your own bed tonight and stay there all night."

I nodded in assent before giving him a last squeeze and sending him out the door to preschool. As I watched him go, I added one last thing to my backpack before heading out the door myself and resolved to remember the balloon, the difference it made to him, and how thoughts on the edges of our consciousness can have such an enormous impact.

Another stupid airline regulation

I swear, can uniform-style jumpsuits made out of airline-approved material be that far behind?

And flying is still a privilege, right?

Hellfire and Brimstone

Last I checked, I wasn't working for the U.S. Marine Corps, or any other such corporate outfit that would restrict my ability to communicate with the outside world.

Alas, the company that gets my butt in its chair for eight hours a day has decided to cut off access to Facebook and Twitter.

Guess I'll have to bring a book to read during my downtime. Or blog to excess. Or post really awful phrases from my work on my blog so people can see the idiocy that I have to put up with.

I know, I know, it's a job. A job. Definitely not a career.

So, FB, I bid you adieu for now. Twitter, I hardly knew ye. Company, I did not sign up for military-like control over my surfing.

Struck

Today I'm struck by the random interaction that can lead to lifelong friendship. No, I haven't started writing for Hallmark. But sharing a class, a desk, or 10 weeks of rehearsal; or a chance meeting at Target, or being introduced by a friend of a friend, or taking the leap and making a phone call, or asking a new acquaintance if she would like to get together for coffee... these are the events that have introduced me to my closest friends. These are the women who know me best, who know that having to hang up the phone to deal with a child-related emergency doesn't mean that I don't want to finish the conversation or hear the end of the story, it means that I would much rather hear the end of the story but the screeching prevents me from doing what I would rather do.

These women, in the various circles I have run, know that I remain connected even when I am far away. They know that they are in my thoughts when I don't call or email. They are aware, through an "autre" female sense that I am experiencing something that makes me think of them.

The turtle, moving too slowly to dodge oncoming traffic....
The stack of carts in the supermarket, all decked in red....

There is more to say, but the child's emergency pulls me away again. Perhaps later I'll finish this thought.