1. I’ve never cooked the holiday turkey or hosted the dinner. We always go to my dad’s or to my inlaw’s and I’m more than ok with that. Tomorrow I’m in charge of bringing the soda pop — this I can do.
2. I am totally wired on caffeine from the strong coffee my friend served me. I mean WIRED. I mean I can barely focus on the computer screen. I am so not going to sleep tonight. I realized it was stronger than I thought after I already drank most of it and I was tripping over the conversation because my brain was going too fast. Then I got paranoid that I was babbling. I would be such a bad drug addict.
3. I had insomnia last night, too. Dang holidays.
4. I need to work on marketing again. (sigh) I’d really like to get some regular repeat gigs so I wouldn’t have to be constantly replacing closed out projects. I’m feeling a little burned out and just want to work for crying out loud.
5. And the economy? Scaring the hell out of me. Maybe it isn’t the holidays that are giving me insomnia.
6. Pennie might be coming to T-day at my dad’s tomorrow because she’d like to spend more holidays with us but she has other demands, too. I hope she can swing it. I also invited her to sleep over Christmas eve but again, she has a broad and busy life so we’ll see. More Pennie is more fun than less Pennie.
7. My dawnfriedman.com hosting account expired and I thought I’d switched it over to a new server but hadn’t. Oops. Now I know why it didn’t get any hits for a week.
8. My horoscope keeps telling me I’m going to be rolling in money soon. If the money doesn’t come through soon, I’m totally suing the astrologer. Or maybe I’ll just quit reading her column — I haven’t decided yet.
9. We bought light orange paint for our family room and then after Brett put the first coat on we noticed the color changed weirdly in artificial light. It went from light orange to neon yellow. Since the chip didn’t do that, we think they mixed the paint wrong. He got a new batch two days ago but now we’re paranoid. He’s going to paint this weekend and meanwhile we are living in chaos.
10. Did I mention that I’m wired?
11. Friday we are going to a left-overs potluck although we won’t have left-overs. Maybe we’ll just bring soda pop again. Saturday we’re having dinner with the inlaw’s to make up for missing Thanksgiving with them (they’re going out of town anyway). Sunday we will rest. Ok, I’ll work and Brett will paint but at least we won’t be social.
12. Quinn is getting lots of earrings. The girl deserves ‘em!

Happy thanksgiving for those of you who celebrate!

Julia and I were talking homeschooling the other day (a big discussion/gentle debate) and she said, I like to think gently, that maybe I liked being the odd parent out and this had something to do with our homeschooling choice. You know, that much of my identity comes from going against the grain.

I’ve been thinking on this. It’s a charge I’ve had leveled at me before especially when I was a disgruntled teen with bad punk rock hair and questionable taste in clothes. It’s true that when I was a teenager that I reveled in my weirdness but that’s just it — I didn’t like to be weird; I was weird. And when I was a teen and grappling with my identity, I wanted to be very in people’s faces about it as teens will be.

So see, it’s not that my identity is wrapped up in being weird like a status symbol; it’s that I am who I am and I’ve learned to be proud of it as opposed to defensive and worried about it. Am I proud of being a homeschooler? Sure. I’m proud that we’re living out our values even though homeschooling has added to our challenges as a family (financially for the most part) and I don’t need that celebrated although it would be nice to have it accepted instead of questioned.

Back to being weird and how it relates to our homeschooling choices. I was an odd kid and pretty early on I figured it out as odd kids will do. It seemed like I usually wanted to do things differently than my friends or had interests that they didn’t share. I’m fortunate that I wasn’t the kind of kid who got harassed much and I’m sure part of this is that my mom (and I think my dad) like me an awful lot and told me so. What made me weird, I learned early on, was also what made me special so I never wanted to pretend to be something I wasn’t.

I think when it comes to intrinsic weirdness having confidence is what saves you from getting harassed. Also as introverted as I am (and this introversion certainly contributed both to my weirdness and my school misery), I do like people and my social skills were always good. You know, “plays well with others” and stuff like that. I’ve always had close knit friends and generally get along with people and my unhappiness with the social world at school had to do with the way I saw it and experienced it and not with how I was treated.

There are two bullies that stand-out in memory — one being some random kid in Chicago who used to follow me home from school and wash my face in the snow. I don’t know how it started or how it ended but I remember the feeling of trying to get across the wide open field between the school and our house during the blizzard of ‘78. The snow was too deep for me to get across quickly, so I’d struggle huffing and puffing and praying he didn’t catch me. The other bully was in middle school, one Eric Bielke who was a big, dumb, mean guy and who had it in for me for reasons I still don’t understand. He’d wait for the Home Ec teacher to leave and then threaten to strangle me. But mostly I had my friends and things were fine as long as I was comfortable with feeling awkward, which I learned to be. Which is to say, again, that my misery wasn’t social misery.

Some weird kids, they have charisma and can wear their weirdness to the top of the pack (my first boyfriend, Joaquin, was one of these). But the rest of us have to make some choices:

• Pretend to be normal as best you can and hope it sticks (it never does).
• Be weird and say screw ‘em.

Continue reading »

I’m going to be working from open to close at HighBall so I’m just dropping by here to say that. I’m not really the kind of gal who goes to a big street party but I wanted to check out the show so I said I’d pull three shifts since that’s more fun than just attending. At least in my book it is! I also featured myself in the last blog. I have no pics of myself in costume because I haven’t been in costume since sixth grade. But my mother-in-law picked up a purple feather mask for me to wear while I serve beer. Nice, isn’t she? Purple feathers is just the ticket for HighBall!

The kids had a good time at my dad’s last night. Madison got in an argument with us this morning when we were talking about Pennie going around with her and Noah said, “Yeah Pennie’s great” and Madison said, “Pennie is MINE!” Take that, Noah!

This was on the way back from picking them up from Gram and Gramp’s house. I had a client meeting to go over products for their spring catalog. I took a camera to get some detail shots but my battery died halfway through it so then I had to rely on the shoddy camera in my phone. Alas. I hope my notes make sense when I get going.

They’re going around again tonight with a friend of Noah’s who’s coming over and maybe my inlaws. I’m a little sad about missing tucking Maddie in because she generally needs a good tucking in after a busy night but Brett can tuck as well as I can. (I’m the one who’ll miss her not the other way around.) I will also miss Brett because it would be about 86 times more fun if he could come, too.

Anyway. I’m off!

Madison’s life is better now that her birthmama is back in town. As we pulled into the airport to pick Pennie up, she sighed and said, “This feels better — having Pennie home.”

After we dropped Pennie off, Madison said that she noticed that Pennie’s pants were falling down. This isn’t quite true. See, most jeans nowadays are low-rise jeans and not every woman has a low-rise body unless she’s comfortable showing some of her tush. 

“So I saw Pennie’s butt,” Madison informed me, exaggerating things.

“Well, how about that!” I responded. “Does she have a cute butt?”

“She does. It’s also kinda big. But not as big as yours.”

I don’t wear low-rise anything seeing as how I inherited my dad’s high waist (meaning my waist is somewhere around my armpits) but now I know I also shouldn’t because I have a big butt. 

Children are precious!

(A note here: I am not at all one of those mom’s who gets her feelings hurt when my children tell me my butt is big, my tummy is squishy or that I’m fat. These things are true and my children say them warmly and usually while patting me kindly or cuddling up. I always say, “Yes, that’s true; my butt is big and I am beautiful.” The beautiful part is technically a fib but they don’t know this because they love me. I figure one of the kindest, most loving things I can do for my kids is to love my own self unconditionally or at the very least fake like I do. So I fake it and sometimes I believe it. Mostly, it works out.)

Number post!

1. I love Bacchus! I love his partner! I LOVE HIS KID! I can’t wait to see him again this spring at the AAC conference!!
2. I’m spending five hours tomorrow at Boo at the Zoo staffing a table. I hope it doesn’t rain. If you’ll be there between 3pm and 8pm, I’ll be there, too, doing time for one of my gigs. Stop by and say, “Boy, you look cold and/or bored!” You’ll probably be right!
3. I think I’m going to be able to get back to my work-out schedule next week because my cold is definitely on its last legs. Thank GOD. I may have forgotten how to exercise.
4. The kids are probably going trick-or-treating twice because for the first time in forever some of the suburbs are having it on a different night than others. So they’re going in my dad’s neighborhood the first night (because Pennie is going out of town for some scary clown concert thingie for Halloween proper and wants to be in on begger’s night) and this neighborhood the second night. I’m going to make them give up the stuff they don’t like to supplement our give-away stash.
5. I’m on the closing shift at HighBall. That’s 11pm to 2am. Pity me. I’m never ever ever out (or even up) that late unless it’s at some Kristen-sponsored event (like her birthday or her annual holiday party). Maybe I should take a picture of Kristen along with me to give me strength!
6. Friday morning I have a meeting to look at samples for catalog copy I’ll be writing for a couple of weeks. So it’s trick-or-treat Thursday night, meeting Friday morning, trick-or-treat II Friday night, Highball and then general collapse Saturday. I think. I need to look at my calendar.
7. Brett is also working very long hours. We are like crazy people over here. Actually sanity seems to be maintaining itself fine but the dustbunnies and dirty dishes are very close to staging a coup.
8. I keep meaning to write an entry about the racism in The Time Traveler’s Wife but can’t seem to find my copy. When I do, I will. Because Time Traveler’s Wife? Totally racist. That book makes me cringe as a writer – to reference Chekov, there are so many unused guns in the book that it reads to me like a self-indulgent daydream. The Violent Femmes dance-off? Just one of ‘em. Plus: Racist.