useless brain functions

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Friday Randomosity: Of Frazz and Birthdays

What are you doing this weekend? I don’t even KNOW what I’m doing. Or maybe I do? I think my mom and I have plans to maybe go shopping? And while we do that, my dad is going to examine this segment of siding that has decided it is a ruffle. And then maybe I will make dinner? My husband also said something about going to look at outdoor furniture??? Was that this weekend???

I feel so overwhelmed by life – all good things!! everything is good and happy and extremely stressful! – that I can literally only think about the step immediately ahead of me. Right now, that looks drinking some water (per Sarah) and making lunch and doing a tiny brain dump. 

  • This Is Just Mean: As you may have gleaned, I have been in such a state of frazz. SUCH A STATE. I keep doing this thing where my brain will smugly prank me and – this requires an example. I was sitting at Carla’s sports practice, scrolling through Twitter trying to work on my sorely neglected novel, when all of a sudden I saw a tweet that said, simply, “One word to describe Cancers” and my brain helpfully said “Your friend H is a Cancer.” And then my body went cold and my heart skipped because a) H is not a Cancer but b) her birthday was ten days ago did I even acknowledge it???? 

I did acknowledge it, both via text and in person, but it still took me several nearly-avoided-a-car-accident moments to recover from the horror of potentially forgetting a friend’s birthday. WHAT THE HELL, BRAIN? 

Especially what the hell because this has been happening all week. Little pinches in the back of the thigh that have been wildly (if momentarily) terrifying and – so far – completely unhelpful. I am doing the things, I guess, even if I am apparently not making a mental record of them having been done.

  • I’m A Lot Like You: My brain has also been doing that thing (HI NICOLE) where it hyperfocuses on one or two lines of a single song, and then blares those two lines ad infinitum into my skull in the middle of the night. (The song in question is El Scorcho, which I quite like as long as I don’t think too hard about the lyrics.) (The narrator is an entitled dick, is my view when I do think about the lyrics, which I have been a lot because they are always elbowing into my thoughts. A girl does not owe you her interest simply because you have a thing for her. Also, maybe don’t read girls’ diaries?)
  • Tiny Weezer Fan: Speaking of Weezer, if you also have a tiny Weezer fan in your household, I just ordered this T-shirt for Carla. It will be one of her birthday presents and I am so excited for her to open it. 
  • Rev-Up of the Birthday Sads: We are getting SO CLOSE to Carla’s tenth birthday. I am excited and happy because it is a joy to see her grow up, but I am also a little sad. On the way to camp this morning, I literally started crying in the car simply because I thought about one specific moment from her birth. She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and was whisked away to the NICU pretty immediately after she was born. I couldn’t move my legs because of the epidural, plus I was shaky and vomity after giving birth, so I remember shrieking at my husband that he needed to go with her. She was brand new! And now she was all alone! Don’t let her be alone!!!! Obviously everything turned out just fine, but the thought of that little new-to-the-world infant, wrenched from her warm cozy womb into a cacophony of unfamiliar blaring light and sound, and then instantly separated from the voices she was accustomed to… Oh my god, it just breaks my heart. Still. 
  • Shellacking the Sad with Other Anxiety! Yay!: So instead of thinking about and possibly dealing with my Feelings, I am masking the sadness with ridiculous worries that are not worries. My latest: Ten is a special age! Should I be doing Something Special? Like, especially special? We are having dinner at Carla’s favorite restaurant with all her grandparents, and then we’ll come home to eat cake (she now wants a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream topped with raspberries, raspberry jam in between the layers, and a raspberry coulis on the side. “Simple,” she said.) (Maybe something like this? With vanilla instead of raspberry buttercream? Or this one, although it’s got cream cheese frosting instead of buttercream? Or this one, which sounds just right but has a few unusual ingredients that are making me squinty?) and open presents. Is there some sort of special You Are Ten type of gift I should be getting her? What is memorable about your tenth birthday? Or the tenth birthdays of people in your life? Can it just be a normal birthday or do I need to do something extra? And if “yes to extra,” what should that be??? Look at that. I am feeling less sad and more stressed as I type! 
  • Pool Hair Do Care: Let’s ABRUPTLY change subjects! Carla is doing a lot of swimming this summer and her hair is not loving it. She has fine hair. It’s light in color. It’s long (below her shoulders). And it’s wavy. This plus repeated chlorine exposure all adds up to hair that feels brittle and does not brush well. I bought some special shampoo and conditioner designed to help with chlorine removal, but either Carla isn’t using enough of it or it needs more time to work. I’ve tried forcing her to wear a swim cap, but a) I can’t police her at camp and b) she’s already lost one swim cap and the other is so tight it gives her headaches and c) it doesn’t seem like the swim caps are actually water tight anyway. I am NOT a swimmer so if you have any swim-related advice, hair specific or other, I would welcome it. 
  • Bloggy Book Club: I used the shampoo/conditioner purchase as an excuse to buy a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I am eager to read as part of Engie’s bloggy book club in July. Are you joining us? I started reading it to Carla this week and her initial impression is that it is boring. I am not sure if she will have a secondary impression because she keeps rejecting my attempts to keep reading. We haven’t even made it through the first chapter! (I do not think it is boring. I think it’s fascinating.) It’s been more than a decade since I first read (listened to) this book, and I’m really excited to see if I love it as much on a second read as I did the first time.
  • Summer Skirt Success: I think I already mentioned this, but I went on a bit of a buying binge in May and got a bunch of cute dresses. This skirt was among them and I wore it for the first time this week and LOVED IT. It is super light, and so long it skims the tops of my feet. I wore it with this bodysuit, which I also surprisingly really like. It’s a nice thick material so that you can’t see a bra underneath it. Well, I didn’t wear, like, a bright purple bra under it or anything so YMMV, I guess. But it’s very soft and I like how smmoth-to-the-body it is compared to a T-shirt; I always feel frumpy when I try to pair a T-shirt with a skirt, but perhaps that’s user error.

All right, I think that’s all I have today. Thanks, as usual, for listening. While things are no less busy around here – and are about to get even busier and more full of change – at least my houseguests are gone and I have the house to myself once more. Laundry is laundrying, the dishwasher is running (somehow we used every single non-specialty drinking glass that I own), and I am starting to feel a teensy bit more normal. My head is still full of Weezer, though. How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it. I gotta sing about it and make a record of my heart.

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Ghosts of Christmas Past Except Not About Christmas and Not Involving Ghosts

My brain is doing that periodic thing that it does which is to torment me with things that happened long ago about which I can do nothing. And then dwelling on those things until I cannot think about anything productive. 

HOW do you stop that? I am not even talking about middle-of-the-night perseveration, although that has been happening too. I am talking about straight up driving home from taking Carla to school and then BAM, “Remember when you did this totally awful and stupid thing? No, but do you REALLY remember it? Let’s go through every moment in excruciating detail.”

There WAS a stupid thing I did, last fall, and I’d managed to forget about it. Until my brain slapped me with the memory.

It was one of those horrible errors that is totally preventable and has an actual cost to it. Like forgetting to return a pair of shoes that don’t fit before the 30-day return period ends. Or backing your car into the garage wall. Or leaving your car windows open all night during a rainstorm. Things that could have been prevented had you been slightly less lazy or more proactive. I can feel my face heating up with residual shame. Such a waste! A preventable waste of money! And not a SMALL amount of money, either. We were so fortunate to be able to pay for my mistake, and my husband was extremely kind about it even though he would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS make that kind of mistake. Why? Why did I let that happen? And why am I thinking about it NOW?

I would say that it’s because I just did another stupid money-wasting thing (My phone has been disconnecting from our wi-fi, and I didn’t notice, and I have just willy nilly been watching Instagram videos and scrolling through apps and downloading – good gourd – a ONE POINT NINE GIGABYTE package of bird sounds from Merlin Bird ID, all while connected to the cellular network. We do not have unlimited data, and in fact only use about 5-6 GB of data per month among the three of us, and I have used NINE GIGABYTES, all by myself, in five days. And we have 25 days left in the month before our data resets. And yet, we can buy more data, a GB at a time, but each GB costs $15 which is not nothing!) but I have been torturing myself with the earlier money-wasting thing for weeks now. So who knows. 

Anyway, it’s good for internal piling on: I am the worst, stupidest person, totally oblivious to important things. I am costing our family money for NO REASON. No one else would make such a dumb mistake! I can see that I’m not connected to wifi just by looking at the top of the phone, and I am on my stupid phone all the damn time! I am a drain on our finances and worthless to boot! 

It’s not even just things I DID, it’s all sorts of things, like how I was going through old yearbooks a few summers ago, and discovered that this boy I’d had a crush on for years had written something filthy in my sixth grade annual. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but I can imagine all the other middle school boys giggling about it. And WHY did he write such a thing? We were friends! I may have had a crush on him, but there was never anything but friendship between us. And I was friends with him for YEARS after he scrawled that crude suggestion in my yearbook. 

Should I throw out my yearbook? Scratch out those awful words with permanent marker? Re-evaluate all my relationships?

Why am I thinking about this? I didn’t even find the yearbook recently; it was AT LEAST two years ago, if not more.

Or the other day, I was out for a lovely walk in the snow and instead of enjoying the feeling of snowflakes kissing my cheeks and the sound of my boots crunching in the snow, I started thinking about another awful boy, this one in high school, who once mentioned he’d seen me outside my music teacher’s house after my lesson, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, waiting for a parent to pick me up. He told me I looked like a hooker. A HOOKER. We were in high school. Why would his mind go there? And why would he TELL me such a thing? And why am I furious about it NOW, a million years after the fact? 

Why are schoolage boys so awful? Not all of them – not yours, surely. But enough of them to make a difference. Will Carla have to deal with boys like this? Will they write grotesque things in her yearbook? How am I going to protect her heart from being infected by terrible people? I have no idea how to protect her or prepare her. I really have no business being a mother if I can’t help her understand that there are people who are mean and hurtful for no reason… but without crushing her spirit.

And then there are more examples of me being a terrible person and parent. Like how last summer, there was a mortifying incident involving another mom and her kids of the sort that makes me a) wonder how, when a child knows The Rules and has shown that they know them and can follow them, they can occasionally not just forget The Rules but flaunt them? And b) how am I possibly equipped to be a parent if I can’t convey the importance of The Rules and how they are meant to be followed always, not just on a whim? I’ve been going over and over that event (which turned out fine! everyone is fine!) and coming up with The Exact Perfect Thing that I should have said or did at the time, instead of saying and doing what I did say and do, which was nothing is except standing in gape-mouthed mortification and letting the other mother take the disciplinary lead. How is this helping anyone, to go over and over it? 

Oh, lord, and there was that other time? With this same mom? When I saw her kid on the sidewalk, by himself, two blocks from home. I was in my car and stopped and asked him if he was okay and if his mom knew where he was, and he said yes and yes. So we kept driving. I pulled up my phone so I call his mother but before I could do so, we saw her on the sidewalk. She was frantic with worry, because she’d lost him. I was able to tell her where he was, but I keep kicking myself for not STAYING WITH HIM and calling her. I could have just stayed right there in my car! But I didn’t! I kept driving! Why? Why did I do that? It all worked out okay, but WHY DID I DO THAT?

You see? It’s not enough that my brain torment me with one thing. It’s got to get right in there with hit after hit after hit. Why can’t it just leave the past in the past and focus on doing the best job possible NOW?

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Wednesday Randomosity: Only In Dreams Edition

I woke up crying this morning, the dream I’d been immersed in was so awful. It involved my husband being horrible to me, which is not in any way true to life, and yet which felt so incredibly real in the dream I am carrying it with me into the day. Stupid dreams and their stupid tendency to hang like a fog of despair around my head.rea Let’s try some Randomosity to see if we can shake the bad feelings loose.

  • For me, bad dreams come from stress, I think; I am stressed about the upcoming volunteer event I am chairing. Back when I worked full time, I had stress dreams much more frequently. And the stress took really horrific and violent forms in the dreams – car chases, people running after me, gun violence, driving off high bridges, gruesome death. My brain is a super fun place. So I suppose it’s an improvement, that now my dreams have turned toward making me feel like my husband no longer loves me? I don’t know. Neither type of dream is enjoyable, and they always stick with me. I feel shaky and sullen and hurt. I’m sure my husband wondered why I was being kind of cold to him this morning. I know it’s a dream, and yet it was so REAL, I cannot help but feel a little unkindly toward Waking World Husband. 
  • Perhaps even worse – or, at least, terrible in their own way – are dreams that involve casual acquaintances. Especially when they are of an erotic nature. There is nothing more embarrassing than seeing a coworker/friend’s spouse/boss/teacher in person after they have graced your dreams. 
  • Why must our brains DO this to us?! I have read some theories that dreams are our brains trying to make sense of the day. But why must they do so in the way that they do? Why can’t they translate stresses and worries and encounters into soothing images that float in gentle rhythm to the calming sounds of babbling brooks and soft harp music?
  • Speaking of music and dreams, I have “Only in Dreams” by Weezer stuck in my head. There are far worse songs to have stuck in one’s head. I love that song, and the entire album from which it comes. Probably one of my favorite albums of all time, the Blue Album. 
  • My husband was playing Weezer songs this weekend. I was sitting on the couch, reading an Agatha Christie novel on my Kindle, and he was sitting next to me, idly scrolling through Weezer songs on his phone and picking them out on his guitar. It was quite pleasant, that gentle serenade of some of my favorite songs. 
  • When I was growing up, and learning how to play the piano, I was very skeptical when my mother said she liked listening to me practice. But now that my husband is teaching himself guitar, and Carla is learning both guitar and clarinet, I have discovered that she wasn’t lying. Even when they make mistakes, even when they play certain measures over and over to get them right, I really enjoy the sound of the two of them practicing. I thought I would HATE the squawk of a poorly played clarinet, but there is much less squawking than I anticipated, and it has a really pleasant sound. Especially, perhaps, when Carla is practicing upstairs and the products of her work are floating down to me through a closed door and a stairwell. 
  • Stephany posted a link to an Ask Me Anything form the other day, and so I blatantly copied it. If you have any burning questions for me, fill out the form and I would love to try to answer them. 
  • Copying Stephany’s idea was not only a chance to engage in a little light plagiarism, but also an opportunity for me to learn a new skill. I had no idea you could use Google to create forms! Best of all, it was very easy (that is, unless you are unable to USE the form, in which case I am a hopeless Luddite). I think I forget that it’s often fun, if a little scary, to try new things. 
  • The desire to keep myself sharp and engaged by trying new things is part of the reason that I volunteered for this event in the first place. This is my second time doing it, and it will be my last. The juice, as they say, isn’t worth the squeeze. The squeeze being the stress and the resulting bad dreams. 
  • Sometimes I contemplate volunteering elsewhere. My paying work is fairly minimal and easy to manage, so I feel as though I could devote more regular time to a volunteer position. But it is so hard to find The Right Thing. Probably what it is, is that I’m scared. Do you volunteer for anything, or have you volunteered for anything in the past? I would love to know about your experiences. 
  • It’s only the second day of November, but I feel like I’m already putting in a covert effort to be part of NaBloPoMo (see San’s post if you want to learn more or join). I have every expectation of failing spectacularly; November just isn’t my month. But it’s fun to read everyone’s posts and to try, even a little, to join in. 
  • NGS is doing NaBloPoMo, but she is also doing a daily noun challenge with her good friend, and I think that’s so fun. I can’t wait to see how she addresses each noun on her list. I imagine that if I run into a post block this month, I may sneak on over to her blog to find that day’s noun and join in. 
  • How do you decide when and what to post? Some of the bloggers I read have an editorial calendar. Some seem to post regular features. I have always been what they refer to in the writing world as a “pantser.” I just… write. Posts either occur to me, or I have a compulsion to sit down and blather a bunch of nonsense into the ether, or I am curious to discuss a certain topic. But there’s really no rhyme or reason about anything I write. I write to write. To get things off my chest. To distract myself from stress. I suppose the only “regular” feature is my weekly (sometimes) Dinners This Week post, but even that falls off a cliff now and again.

Well, today writing has done the trick. The dream sadness has lifted. The sun is shining, the world is covered with a layer of leaves, and I have work to do. I hope you have a wonderful day, Internet. Thank you for reading, and in doing so, dispelling the stress.