Monday, September 29, 2008

Tori, Call me!

     I've been told by "cool people" that I'm not supposed to admit that I love the Tori and Dean show.  I was in bed with a sore throat today, and watched a Tori and Dean marathon, all episodes I've seen before, and I just don't care; I love this show.  I think I could totally be friends with Tori Spelling, and those are words I never thought I'd utter.  I want to check her book out from the library, and its all I can do to not run down there right now and pick it up.  At one point in the show today, Tori made me cry, and I'm not ashamed to say that I cried at the exact same point in this episode the last time I saw it.  I'm a total fan, and now everyone knows it.  Well, everyone who reads this blog.  So, all both people know it.
     I don't know how I can love really intelligent shows like the West Wing and love Tori and Dean.  I'm a television chameleon, I guess.  On principle, I don't like reality TV, unless its cooking or decorating shows (which are apparently in the reality category, but I don't really think of eating a stick of butter in every meal "reality") but I can't help myself when it comes to Tori. 
     Speaking of TV, I finally watched the season premier of Grey's Anatomy last night (one of my "intelligent shows" ; right!) and I dare say miss Meredith put on a few needed pounds.  I still find her hard to look at, but I watch the show anyway.  It fills the time between Mad Men episodes and the return of Lost.  
     Upon further reflection, I think it would be hard to be friends with Tori.  I sit around all day watching her show, and she seems to work pretty hard.  So what if she's working at decorating her house, at least she's in the game.  I don't think I'd have the  patience to look at fabric samples with her, unless she was buying lunch after.  I think she has a bawdy sense of humor, though, and I could totally get behind that.  But, I guess I'll just have to make do with my current friends, even though they're totally unlike BFF Tori.  Oh well...

Sunday, September 28, 2008

     I just took two nyquil gelcaps, so this post may deteriorate as I go on.  I may start talking nonsense and referring to helicopters as whirlybirds.  I seem to have picked up a bug from somewhere, some six-year-old-where, and Rob got it too.  He requires much less than I do when he's sick.  He just goes to bed, and I bring him something to drink from time to time, and take his temperature repeatedly.  I've gotten pretty good at feeling foreheads for fevers (makes me feel very maternal to do this) but he wants a number.  When he has even a mild fever, he likes to call his mom to tell her he has a fever.  This is actually an improvement over how it used to be; he used to call his mom every time he had a sniffle so he could hear her ask him if he'd taken his temperature.  Still, he is pretty easy when he's sick.  I am much more pitiful.  I require trips to the store for smoothies and 7-up and nyquil gelcaps.  I stay in bed and watch decorating shows, cooking shows, old movies (and by old I mean from the 80's and 90's) and stumble into the kitchen to test my equilibrium and get cereal.  I always want cereal and junk food when I'm sick.  Although, frankly, I usually want cereal and junk food whether I'm sick or not.   
     I should admit here that I fell asleep during the presidential debate.  I hung in there as long as I could, but I got the gist and drifted off.  I was coming down with something, okay?  I'm still a conscientious citizen, and I will try my best to stay awake during the next one.  People around me seem to think that Palin will drop out for "personal reasons."  I think they are underestimating her.  She seems just ignorant enough to believe she can do the job.  I can't wait until the election is over, I'm so sick of it.  I've been sick of it for what seems like years.  My husband has turned political junkie, and I'd like him to get a new hobby.  Poor thing, he can't talk about sports, he can't talk politics.  He can talk about me, though, that's fine, even encouraged.  As long as he keeps bringing me smoothies when I'm sick, though, I guess I can hang.  
     I think the nyquil is taking effect, but I can't tear my eyes away from the Cosby show rerun I'm watching.  Pitiful.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Clouds Lifted, Angels Sang

     I had a cheeseburger tonight.  I was so damn hungry, I couldn't take it anymore.  I needed meat, I needed bun, I needed lettuce and tomato, and I got it, and it was like a dream come true.  I did not get french fries or a soda, so I think I was still inside the 1500 calorie/day limit.  God, I love food.  Not all food equally, but I love food.  I read Leila a chapter of Ramona Quimby, Age 8 tonight, and Ramona is served tongue for dinner and likes it until she finds out its tongue.  I have eaten tongue, and, like Ramona, didn't know it was tongue, and I liked it!  It tasted like a really tender piece of beef.  I never ate it again, and you'd have to pay me a lot of money to buy it, prepare it and eat it, but it was good.  I think the presentation at the meat counter is part of the problem; if they sliced it up into little medallions, and it didn't look like what it is, I think people would eat it more often.  Although, for all I know, everyone except me eats tongue once a week.


p.s.  The spider I rescued out of the bathtub the other day made an appearance in Leila's room.  We (meaning my husband) fixed all the screens so it can't get out.   It could be anywhere...  Maybe, after I go to bed, it will blog...

Monday, September 22, 2008

     There are so many fascinating things to write about today, I hardly know where to start!  Should I continue to bore you with my efforts in the 1500 calorie-a-day challenge?  Great!  I'm starving!  How about what I got in the mail?  Absolutely nothing!  What brought me the greatest joy of the day (besides the toothless obvious?)  Lunch!  Super!  
     I have a friend, actually, my husband has a friend, who has a wife, to whom I've had the "pleasure" of speaking on several occasions, who once said something I'll always remember and will share with you now:  She said, "I know the most important things in life are health and your your family, blah,blah, blah, but I have all that, and now I want the stuff!"  I mention this because I'm afraid of sounding like the spoiled brat that I am if I don't go on and on about the joyful moments of motherhood, and the satisfaction of a clean load of laundry and dinner on the table at six (as if.)  So, let me say now, that I do get great joy from my family, and you can trust that I know what is important in life, and now I just want to blather on about other... stuff.
     I was feeling sad and nostalgic when I wrote my last post, so I want to make it up to you by telling you a reunion story that doesn't make anyone look bad, except for me, and I think the fact that I am admitting and laughing at what happened totally cancels out my looking bad.  OK, so, at the reunion, I was making my way around the crowd of people I didn't remember or care about talking to, and I saw a female former classmate who could not have been more of a stranger to me, standing alone.  I was feeling a little at a loss for who to talk to, so I walked over and introduced myself and started talking to her.  She was nice enough, and she clearly had no idea who I was either, and by and by a male classmate came up and stood there with us.  It was really loud in the room so nobody could hear the huge hot fart I ripped, but I could totally smell it, and I'm sure my classmates could too.  I quickly wrapped up our meaningless conversation and walked away, totally giggling to myself that I had just smoked them out.  Come to think of it, she could have been waiting for him.  Maybe they were going to go make out!  Maybe this woman had been dreaming of this moment for twenty years!  She was finally going to make out with the guy she had a crush on in high school, and, to kick it off, she had to smell the fart of a perfect stranger (that would be me.)
     I don't actually think farts are that funny, and I don't like to have to smell my own let alone someone else's, but I do think stories about farts are funny, so there you go.  
     

Sunday, September 21, 2008

I think I know her...

     I went to my 20th high school reunion last night, and was shocked when a former classmate called me bored housewife! Thanks, John!  John and his wife, Shannon, have what sounds like a really cool glass blowing business in West Seattle that I am definitely going to visit the next time I'm up there.  I had a huge, embarrassing crush on John in the eighth grade, and I remember that he was very sweet about it and never hurt my feelings, not even when he invited my best friend to the eighth grade graduation dance.
     Anyway, the word for the whole evening was Didn't.  There were so many people I would have liked to see that didn't come.  Most of the people I hung out with didn't come actually, which left me with a few people who were lovely to talk to, but I missed my old friends.  Some of them said they "wouldn't be caught dead" at the reunion and I just don't get this.  There was nothing to fear.  A lot of the time, it felt like when you see someone you used to know, and you duck and hope they didn't see you because you don't really want to engage and you just know that you will remember them but they wont remember you and you'll end up feeling like some kind of stalker.  I learned, though, that instead of being seen as some obsessed fan, it is flattering when someone remembers you, makes a bee-line for you to tell you something they always wanted you to know, and from now on when I see someone at the mall who I know I know, I will make the approach.  It is fun to be reminded of things, like that one classmate and I had to be separated in English class because we jabbered all the time.  This same person told me that he and I were sweethearts at Ross Valley Nursery school which I had never known.  Another guy told me he remembers my coming up to his house when we were eight or nine with a soccer ball wanting to play and that he had thought at the time that I was brave; I remembered that he ate a hotdog with twenty-plus packets of mustard on it while the whole fifth grade classroom looked on, and he had to stay home the following day because he broke out in hives.  He remembered this, too.
     I felt much the same as I did in high school: forgettable, a few memories with a few nice people, and skirting the edges of a group I really wasn't interested in joining.  I noticed that a lot of pain was revealed; classmates who had lost one or both parents, or who had been dealing with terrible situations at home.  I felt sad when I got home.  I spent some time looking through my yearbook and noticing all the things I Didn't do in high school.  No sports, only one student group, no homecoming games.  For a moment I felt sorry for my sixteen year-old self and then I realized I'm the same way now.  I am not naturally social, I am not a joiner, I like my few great friends and I crave solitude.  I thought about what I was doing while all those things I wasn't doing were going on, and I honestly can't remember.
     Somebody said to me last night that they were surprised that I am a housewife, and this person didn't say it like they were impressed.  They seemed to have expected more from me.  That's okay; I'm doing what I always wanted to do, but I'm not overly impressed, either.
     So that was the reunion I waited 20 years for.  My feet hurt and I'm a teensy bit hung over, but its all good.  Thanks Tommy and John, Kate and Leslie, Stephanie and Laura, Melissa and David and Tim for remembering me last night.  And to Rebecca and Courtney, Kevin and Aaron and Jason, Mia and Kathleen, Todd and Eva, I missed you guys.
     In other news, Leila lost a tooth the other day and got 11 quarters from the tooth fairy.  She rested them in the bathroom sink while she brushed her hair, and three of them went down the drain.  Its a metaphor for something, but I have no idea what.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

I was sitting on the toilet this afternoon (yes, I really am going to start this post that way) and I saw a spider in the bathtub attempting to climb up the side of of the tub.  It kept sliding back down, and trying again, over and over, and was still doing it when I came back hours later to take a shower.  This is not a comment on the cleanliness of my bathtub, we've been through that already.  Leila had pointed this spider out to me first thing this morning, so presumably it had been climbing up and sliding down the bathtub wall all day long.  I tried to rescue it on a piece of paper, but it wasn't having it and kept leaping out on a little web, back into the tub.  I did eventually rescue it, but I didn't put it outside, so its wandering around somewhere in my house, hopefully relieved, certainly exhausted.  
 I started the day by making a To Do list, that didn't fit on one page, and I plugged away at the list all day and got a fraction of the stuff done.  Being busy does not mean un-bored.  Nothing on the list was the least bit exciting, and now this wretched dinner thing again.  
Have I mentioned that I'm trying to keep to 1500 calories a day?  Brutal, and not at all scrumptious.  At around 5 o'clock, I lose all creative energy and motivation (assuming I had some to begin with) and start feeling like a starving beast, ready to eat my own hand.  You'd think I'd be rushing to make dinner, but, no, I'm too distracted by thoughts of In n Out burgers and things with sauce.  How do people live like this?  
Yesterday in school, Leila's teacher was talking about the constitution and voting, and told the kids that people could vote for either John McCain or Barack Obama: one kid started it, and the others chimed in until the whole class of first graders was chanting, "Brock Obama!  Brock Obama!"  I remember going to the multi purpose room of my elementary school in the first grade to watch the inauguration of Jimmy Carter on a little TV set, and now my daughter will get to watch an inauguration in first grade, too.  Go Brock!

Vegetables Scare Me

I have a refrigerator full of food and I can't figure out what to make for dinner!  Its crazy making, this dinner thing.  I looked through two cookbooks, trying to find a recipe that incorporated eggplant, onion, chicken, maybe even broccoli with a yummy sauce, and I got tripped up by my own inflexibility.  If I make the eggplant recipe that I'm looking at, that says the eggplant will absorb the sauce, will I be left with dry chicken and rice?  If I make the Lo mein recipe, will it work to substitute almost everything in the recipe, including the noodles, and just use the sauce?  In the end, I abdicated this responsibility entirely and made my husband make dinner, which he is doing right now.  I know I should feel so lucky to have a man who doesn't mind having eggplants shoved at him after a long  day in the office, but all I'm feeling is disappointed, in advance even, that I don't get anything yummy for dinner.  What he's making could turn out to rock my world, but all I keep thinking about is the eggplant and ground chicken dish at PF Changs, and anything less than that will be disappointing.  I'm such a brat.  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

My first blog.  I am assured that people read these things, and my good friend confided in me that she is somewhat of a blog fanatic, so ok, I can blog, too.
I have called my blog Bored Housewife Syndrome because I am a housewife, and, frankly, I'm a little bored.  My daughter is 6 and in first grade.  The age where some say either get a job or have another baby.  See, while your child is in school, and while they're playing with friends or having lessons after school, you have time on your hands.  A lot of time.  I observe many women who seem so busy and stressed, advertisements and Oprah devote a lot of time to these women, and I just don't get it.  I am not busy, unless you call watching Cosby Show reruns while eating popsicles, busy.  Some women are actually busy, working inside and outside the home, having multiple children, cleaning their houses, going to the gym, but I am not one of these women.  I am blessed to have what I always wanted and that which is still the most important thing to me: the luxury of staying home with my only child while she's little.  I'm crazy about my kid, I treasure the time I have with her, and this is really a once in a lifetime opportunity that is worth every sacrifice.  Now that she's six, though, there's a lot of sitting around waiting for her to need something.  Not only waiting for those times when she has a fever, or needs something explained to her, or wants you to read Charlotte's Web, things that really feel like parenting, but sometimes she needs you to take her to music class, and do her laundry, and tie her shoes.  Of course she needs these things, she's six after all;  that's what I'm here for, and I'm happy to do it.  But in the meantime, I read a lot of magazines.
I could spend my free time cleaning my house and going to the gym, and, honestly, I should.  I am a complete failure at the house keeping part of house wifery.  My house is clean enough, I guess.  I mean, I wouldn't eat off my kitchen or bathroom floors, but the dishes are done, and everyone has clean underwear, and the dog is brushed, but the blinds are dusty, and there's that pink mildew between the shower tiles, and the stove is embarrassing. I've seen worse.  Some of these things would take no time at all if I did them regularly, but I don't, so things go from slightly unclean to disgusting and become lengthy, intimidating chores.  When I do scrub the shower tiles, though, it has a huge impact.  I show it off when my husband come home from work, "look at the shower!  Isn't it clean?  Can you remember a time when it was this clean?"  Thank goodness for house guests, that's what I say, I don't even want to think about what my place would look like if it wasn't for wanting to give a false impression to people who see me once a year.
So, that is the background for my blog.  
Right at this moment, my daughter, Leila (pronounced Lila; I insisted on the extra 'e' which I now regret.  Too late now!) is sitting with me at the kitchen table along with her friend, Eva (easy to spell, easy to say) eating soy crackers from Trader Joe's and drinking apple juice.  Their play date began when I picked them up from school and we weren't in the house 15 minutes before Eva was crying and Leila was tattle-taling.  Apparently, Eva threw a piece of Polly Pocket clothing at Leila's chest, and Leila felt the need to tell me about it.  Oh, the drama...  If you've never seen Polly Pocket clothing, imagine someone throwing a rubber band at your chest; not shooting it at you, just throwing it at you.  Hardly a reason for informants and tears.  Now they are running back and forth along the length of my house, screaming, and playing chase with the puppy, Perry.  
Leila's first grade class is doing a section on Mexico, and today they colored in maps and glued things to the map that you might find in Mexico: popcorn (or maize) tinfoil (silver, I'm guessing) and there was a cotton ball on there that I can't explain.  The other day, Leila apparently told her teacher she had a short Spanish song she wanted to sing, so with Ms. Houts' permission, she stood up in front of the class and sang... Frere Jacques.