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Tonight…

  • Posted on December 11, 2009 at 5:00 pm

…we will not be attending the Elementary School Christmas Clusterfuck. K says that Christopher isn’t going, so it’s okay for him to not go. out of 100 1st graders, 2 won’t really be missed.

instead, i will remove the sweater turtleneck that is trying to choke me, grab one of my husbands comfy over-sized sweatshirts, and relax on the couch with my children.

we will play video games. we will eat popcorn. we will have m&ms. we will have utterly divine homemade banana bread, and we will listen to christmas music while enjoying this weekend the best we can without daddy. (he got called into work yesterday) i will also never put on a turtleneck again.

THAT is what we will do tonight.

Another School Rant

  • Posted on at 2:53 pm

one more thing i hate about my son’s school.

not that it’s a bad school… in fact, it’s an excellent school. one of the best schools in this state.

but nothing is ever perfect. this school’s achilles heel is their parking.

yes, parking.

there are about 100 1st graders in a school that goes from K-5th grade. they have about 60 parking spaces. there are no commercial buildings next door (or within several miles) that might provide extra parking, and even the grass is off limits today, as the snow is piled high in melting snow banks on either side of the road.

for thanksgiving, the first grade did a little “feast” and a presentation that the parents and grandparents were asked to attend. we went, and every single parking space was taken. i had to park on the side of the road. in the middle of my son’s presentation, an announcement was made over the intercom for all the parents who were parked in the spot i was parked in to move. the buses couldn’t get into the school.

so i had to pack up my very lively toddler, ask the 1st grade teacher if it was almost over, and run with a toddler in my arms as soon as my son was done with his part in the play. (i wasn’t about to miss him, not even for the buses!) when i re-parked my car in an available parking space (a lot of the other parents had left right after the feast, rather than staying for my son’s classroom presentation) i ran back to the school, packed up my other kid, and finally made it back to the car to drive home. it was a big fat pain in the ass i would have rather gone without, except that K probably would have cried if i hadn’t have gone. they worked very hard to memorize their lines.

that was just the first graders, and for tonight’s Christmas presentation, they actually expect all the parents and grandparents to be there. not to mention the pancake supper before hand.

i’m not sure what they think i’m going to do with my mom wagon, but if i can’t find a damn parking space tonight, i’m going to bribe K with buttered popcorn and Little Big Planet, and beg him not to be upset that he’s going to miss singing in the concert. i’m not going to drop him off on the front steps and drive around until he’s done- and if i can’t find somewhere to park, i don’t see any other options.

i’m considering bribing him on the way home from school, and not even making the attempt to park tonight… yesterday, when i asked him if he was excited about the concert, he said “not really. we’re just singing.” i’m secretly hoping that he doesn’t really want to do it at all and he’ll give me cool mom points for sparing him the torture of a school christmas concert. i don’t have high hopes.

ugh.

thanks for listening. just had to get that off my chest.

Fiction Friday: Hell

  • Posted on at 7:00 am

what is “hell”? i mean really. every religion, every society, every individual has a different version of their own Hell. for some people, it’s nothing more than a state of mind or being. for other people it’s the place where you go when you’ve been a bad, bad person. sometimes when i think too hard about it, i remember the movie “What Dreams May Come“. if you haven’t seen it, it’s a really good movie. i’ll be honest, i don’t remember the finer details of the movie, because it never fails to make me cry. i don’t particularly like to cry during movies, so sometimes my favorite movies go unwatched for years. like What Dreams May Come and The Notebook.

the other day i was driving over a bridge. driving scares me… driving over bridges scares the shit out of me. i’ve had multiple dreams of drowning, even more dreams of driving a car off a bridge and drowning, and i’ve had one too many car wrecks for me to feel comfortable in a car. or near water.

when i looked out over the bridge, it was freezing outside. it had just snowed the night before, and a frozen drizzle was still drifting down, transforming the snow and slush into perilous chunks of ice. have i mentioned that i hate driving? how about how much i hate winter? when i looked over the bridge, i saw a frightening expanse of gray and white chunks of ice and snow, with dark lines of frozen water trying to break through like cracks in an old plaster wall. it looked so cold.

it had the pallor of a dead, gray, flesh, and for a moment it made my heart stop. as i gazed at that expanse of river, for just a split second my mind had a brief flash of what my own personal Hell might look like.

i would be cold and naked in the frozen water. i would probably have just enough frozen water and chunks of ice in my lungs that i would feel death claim me every second for the rest of existence. my lips would be blue, and everything else in the world would be winter gray and black. my mind would be paralyzed with the cold, and stuck on thoughts of my children, not knowing where they are and how they are doing. my hands and feet would be black with frostbite and stuck in frozen claws, aching with the bitter cold.

in a few words? it would really fucking suck.

of course, at the same time i realize that if i were to ever experience Heaven OR Hell, it would be like nothing my mind is even capable of imagining, or nothing my mind would allow me to imagine until i had to face the reality of it. i think that’s probably a good thing.

luckily, my torture and thoughts of Hell didn’t last long, when i realized i wasn’t looking over the bridge onto a river of frozen ice chunks and snow… i was looking at a freaking field. a plowed field in which the wind had blown the snow over the ground in perfect mimicry of rippling waters. the actual river, when i finally got to it, was still a muddy brown and dead gray, but it wasn’t frozen. to my relief. i also felt a little foolish for mistaking that field for the river, but i was too busy driving in bad weather to dwell on it.

my imagined version of the physical Hell (because i am very aware there is such a thing as Hell on Earth, and i’d prefer not to ponder that, thanks) is going into “Fiction Friday” because i’m hoping that it will stay right where it belongs… in the Fiction section.