Just Forking Around

Sorry about the title – as Craig Ferguson says – “I made myself laugh and that’s half the battle”. I really do enjoy bad puns – they’re stupid and low brow and show a distinct lack of imagination, I like to think of them as my homage to our President.

But I digress …

It’s official – Sunday and Monday have become one long continuous day. It appears I’ll be stuck working both days every weekend for awhile and I need to adjust to that. I’m a bit pissed about this development; Sunday mornings are my favorite part of the week. Now I open my eyes and almost immediately feel my back still aches, my feet hurt and I have to get to the store. I’m going to need to decide what to do about Everyday Kindness Sunday wrap-up. So typical of me, it’s only an official thing for me but I still feel the
need to negotiate with myself about how to re-schedule it, and let me tell ya – I am a bitch negotiator. There are positives to working Saturday and Sunday; it leaves me more time for my real job during the week when clients expect to find me and I’ve always preferred doing errands and stuff in the middle of the day on a weekday – less crowds, less screaming kids, less traffic. So there – I’ll focus on that.

I saw “walking woman” Saturday night – I caught a glimpse of her going into “creepy guy walking dogs” house as I drove by. She was dressed up – a Saturday night date perhaps!? I hope so and I really hope I run into her soon so I can get the full story.

Mia is doing OK – the sneezing has started back up a bit and her eyes seem more sensitive again so we’ll be going back to the vet this week. BUT – she’s eating and last night she had a full hour play session with my son. She actually ran and fetched toys and jumped on higher places and just plain looked so happy. Siren is super pissed about this. How dare anyone have fun without him. I was planning to go to phase 2 of the introductions – Mia in the giant kennel and Siren out and about where he can approach her, discover her so to speak, without hurting her. I’m putting that on hold til the vet visit. So for now they communicate through the screen door – Mia hisses and growls and attempts to punch Siren’s lights out while he stares at her with laser beams of death eyes. Eventually she goes back to sleep and he comes out to punish me.

I am working on the slide show – I’m just a wee bit tired these days.

I also have a bunch of things partially written; a scathing rant about the ‘art of distraction’ regarding the media’s attention to Obama’s minister and his supposed racist sermons, an expose of how workers are treated in large retail establishments, a little ditty about what it’s like to work long hours from home and a winding ramble about blogging and message boards – the virtual water cooler I call it. Due to lack of time or brain cells each of these pieces started to lose focus and I found myself veering off the path into places I wasn’t prepared to go so …

I’m feeling a bit forked up.

There’s a very specific reason I named the blog ‘Forks Off The Moment’ – my therapist told me too. Now that’s not really true but sometimes it feels as if it is. I always loved to write – as a child I composed these elaborate fairy tales that revolved around being anywhere but where I was. In my early teens I kept very poetic, uber serious journals about politics, Viet Nam, rock music, drugs, sex and being anywhere but where I was. One of my proudest academic moments was the reaction to a paper I wrote in High School discussing the symbolism and emotional appeal of the song ‘American Pie’ – good grades always came easy to me but this grade was like winning an Oscar. People got what I wrote, they found it important and interesting and were entertained by it – I was somewhere other than where I was. Typical of what was to become my thirty-something years of self-destructive, self-sabotaging brilliance I ditched going to college to study journalism and got pregnant by an alcoholic loser twice my age. Talk about a huge fork off the moment!

Back to why it’s all the therapist’s fault.

I’ve been to therapy a few times over the years; first with my son after his Dad disappeared and it seemed that anger would consume him, then again when my sister killed herself (ain’t we a cheery lot!?) and it seemed that anger and grief would consume us all and finally (I think) this past fall – right before I started the blog – because I simply decided that being in my 50s was going to be better than the previous 4 decades. That brave decision was immediately followed by panic and depression the likes of which stunned me. The therapist thinks I need to practice living in the moment until I can learn to manage the dark places my mind takes me. Regardless of how many times I have survived something, fixed something, rescued something I always feel, always imagine, that the next time will be the end of me. When my business was struggling I stayed awake all night making plans on how to be homeless; would I go to a shelter? – would I live under a bridge? (I have troll fantasies) – what about Siren!? – how would I care for him under a bridge? – could I manage his carrier in my shopping cart? From zero to sixty! I fork off the moment.

Maybe that’s why I’m having trouble finishing anything real. The Obama piece was taking me into my own personal experiences with racism which leads to intense negative feelings about my son’s in-laws. The piece about part-time retail workers made me so angry about this President (as if I needed one more reason) and his economic follies. The ditty about working from home got me to worrying about this current dry spell and trying to describe message boards put me in a bad mood over people who are rude and judgmental, not to mention ignorant and boring.

I’m so grateful to Raven for Wordzzle and to REH for the PFC challenge. These trips into writing fiction are enjoyable and (I hope/I think) are making me a better writer. Plus they create a perfect opportunity to discover new blogs. Which reminds me, I have to update my bookmarks and my sidebar and …

More later - when the traffic jam in my head eases up.