Last night, I was laying in my bed, in the dark, staring at the ceiling and doing nothing I shouldn’t have been doing when Kiddo mumbled something immediately to my right. As in, she was standing by my head and I hadn’t heard her creep up. She was so stealth, I didn’t even catch her in my periph. She was a nighttime ninja.
She is a frequent sleep talker but less so a walker. She started mumbling on in her sleep speak about how, “the space is too small for me… my space… it’s too small…” And then she half-laid down, half- collapsed in a small, tightly curled ball on my bed, with her head facing the foot. I rubbed her back to wake her up fully and told her to go back to bed. She did mostly wake, and look at me like, ‘what in the hell, woman? I was sleeping peacefully in my own damn bed until you came along.’
I’m only left to wonder what in the hell six-year-olds dream about.
Filed under: family
She absorbs sun, I repel it.
Her eyes are 7,243 colors and mine are three, at best.
She is athletic, I am a hermit.
She has a lot of friends at age 13, I had about four.
She already discovered good music, I didn’t until I was seventeen.
She is above the influence of everything negative, I bent over backwards to peer pressure.
She is independent and confident, I was plagued by self-esteem issues.
She’s lightyears ahead of 13-year-old me and I turned out okay. Can you imagine how much cooler this kid is gonna get?
Filed under: workplace
Working mostly be phone or e-mail, a year could pass before you put a face to a name.
That happened today and the person was strikingly sexy. I wonder if my tone will change next time she calls…
-CJ
Filed under: daily
Give me Ibu or give me death.
I have had headaches since I grew eyeballs. My vision is the culprit of my Ibuprofen use. I take them five at a time, per headache. There have been days that I’ve exceeded 4,000 mg because the back of my head, simultaneously with the space between my eyes, splits wide open and beats a bloody fucking tempo until I soothe it with medication.
Just now, as I felt the familiar split in the back, favoring the left side, I realized I’ve taken significantly less headache medicine since I stopped drinking. I haven’t panicked about having pills handy or snuck into the receptionist’s stash in weeks.
That alone will ensure I make two months with no alcohol.
(Today is one month!)
-CJ
A few years ago, some friends and I got our palms read. I was told I was a Chinese philospher in a previous life, and I would have twins, eventually.
This morning my co-worker sent out a happy birthday e-mail to someone in our other office (I’m in a small, remote office) from all of us in my department, complete with Clip Art images representing each of us. You can see what I look like, more or less, in the ‘mucho gusto, lovely‘ section.
This is the clip she used for me:
She’s adorable and all…
-CJ
I’m already sick of reading about Native Americans.
(I know we KNOW that the white man screwed the indian, but MY GOD. It’s so much worse than I ever realized.)
But I’ll keep reading and studying and note taking. If only because my teacher is hot. I mean, I totally wanna learn and get As and stuff. And he has a saucy accent. I mean, I wanna excel.
Last night we were asked what we think defines American culture. One guy, without missing a beat, said, “Easter bunny & Santa Claus.”
Is there such thing as a lethal amount of Diet Coke? I’ve got to be approaching that threshold.
This weekend, Kiddo is with Dad, leaving me to be twenty-four and throw keggers and dance in the buff. But I’ll be reading and vacuuming and doing my laundry because I am the coolest kid on the block.
Actually, I have company bunking in for a while and unless I want him wading through dog hair and running for the hills, I should spruce the place up.
I’m very much looking forward to sitting still.
-CJ
He knows what you did last night.
And he is pissed.
Now I just need the one that Kiddo thinks looks like me.
My parents are not really pet people. Correction: My dad is not a pet person, under any circumstances. My mom is more susceptible to an animal’s sweetness and cuteness and she can be coerced into loving a pet.
And yet forever and ever, my family has had dogs. They were mostly mutts, save for the Collie we had when I was toddling around in my parents’ first house (Ralphie), and the Collie we inherited from a relative and quickly returned to said relative when she bit my brother’s face (Valentine) and the miniature Collie we had for many years that was not only the coolest of all the dogs, he was the smartest and the sweetest too (Shasta).
We got Shasta when I was around eight. He was itty bitty precious tiny and he vomited in my lap during the car ride home. It was love. About eight years later, when I was sixteen and scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins for minimum wage, my mom left the house to come pick me up at work and found his small brown body and white mane on Lambert. She took Whittier Blvd home that night and I didn’t found out why she’d re-routed for a long time.
When I was sixteen, my friend Carly gave me a red-eared slider named Jack. I’ve had her for 8.5 years but there’s only so much cuddling her and I are capable of when she is a half water, half land pet.
I moved in with some friends and my boyfriend when Kiddo was two and a half. We got an English bulldog named Moo from my boyfriend’s uncle, a breeder. She was the sweetest, stinking dog you’ve ever met. She wheezed and slobbered and smelled, like an English is wont to do and I adored her. Unfortunately when I moved home she couldn’t come with me and went to live with an animal lover friend of a friend. I never saw her again.
Five years since Moo, I took in Lucy on a whim. My cousin had taken her in when a family was nearly evicted from their apartment for hiding her. She was just a pup and she couldn’t live with my cousin. She sent me a picture and I agreed to keep her having never met her. When she came around late last summer, or early fall, I thought she was ugly. She was annoying because she was so skittish and afraid of the whole world. She wouldn’t potty train and I lacked the skills and patience to properly train her. She resulted in us tearing out our dining room floor and replacing it with vinyl. She resulted in a deep cleaning and dog pee treatment in our living room. She has eaten my $300 prescription sunglasses, my $550 mouth guard and more pairs of work pants than I can count. I have replenished my entire underwear stock more then three times. She got a hold of my keys, the television remote and my ex boyfriend’s glasses. She’s taken down the kitchen trash can and dragged its contents around the house numerous times. When she tires of the kitchen trash, she moves on to the bathroom trash. She tore two holes in the couch, ruined our screen door, and tore a hole in my window screen. The amount of damage and fury caused by this dog had me throwing my hands up and pulling my hair out every single day. My roommate/best friend Ree tried to convince me to give her up. Find a home for her where someone was equipped to train a monster puppy and wasn’t leaving her for nine hours a day. And eventually I did cave in. I couldn’t take the frustration or the cost to replenish my wardrobe any longer and I asked around and sent pictures out. Loveable puppy, needs some training. No takers.
It took several months for me to really grow attached to her. To really feel like she was my dog and it was my responsibility to take good care of her. I had never fully realized the extent of care a dog requires. I was a naïve and stupid pet owner.
As Lucy grew on me, I tried to embrace her faults and work with her, instead of against her. I finally took her to get all of her shots and I put a nametag on her with her name and my cell phone number engraved on a silver bone.
She’s still dumb as all hell. She sits but leaps back up immediately. She charges the screen door and bolts out of the house at every opportunity, playing a game with anyone who tries to snatch her back up. But it’s been a long time since she chewed anything or made a mess. Since we installed a doggy door, she’s only had one accident in the house. She has grown on me like mold, overly and annoyingly and disgustingly. She’s a nuisance when I have company over because she protects the door by barking at you incessantly. Then she wants to cuddle your head. No, really. She hops up on the back of the couch and tries to wrap herself around your neck like a mutt-scarf. She sleeps at the foot of my bed and no matter how much kicking or tossing I do, she will not budge. And I love it. I want her to sleep there every single night, and wrap herself around my head when I’m on the couch, and sit in my lap and press her face against my chest like she always does. She wants constant contact, affection, petting, love. And I probably shouldn’t give it to her as often or as quickly as I do because I’m the master and all the shit. But I am so overwhelmingly in love with her, finally, almost a year later, and I’m painfully aware of what a bad pet owner I was and how much grief my little bitch caused my roommate. I owe them both some serious gratitude and lots and lots of presents for their patience while Lucy and I figured each other out.
-CJ
Yesterday I anxiously finished If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. I’d been flirting with the pages of the short story Miss Arizona, raising my eyebrows again and again, surprised by how simply and perfectly something would be described. I think I love Welsh.
Now I’ll be buried in the assigned texts for Ethnic Studies, all two of them, chapter upon chapter every night. This is the not the class for the full time worker, I’ve learned. I somehow have to fit about three chapters of reading after 9:30 p.m. every night to be prepared for class the next night.
I’m trying not to be stressed about this, or the lack of sleep for the next four weeks, or the fact that my house is already a disaster because I didn’t have time to make my usual round for cleaning up or or or…
You can see how I may drown myself in anxiety. I’m going to focus harder than ever before on time management and keeping ahead in my assignments and not waiting until the last minute to write my research paper, like I always do.
I will.
I WILL!
-CJ
