Riddle me this, is there a correct any way to fold a bloody fitted sheet?  I’m thinking there’s some great housekeeping secret that is completely beyond me, or I’m missing that sheet-folding gene, but I’m about one origami crane anyway from going apeshit and setting them on fire in my driveway.  One FITTED SHEET SHOULD NOT TAKE UP AN ENTIRE SHELF, what the hell?  Screw the Rubik’s Cube and chess, I dare any card-carrying Mensa member to the challenge of the fitted sheet.  Solve THAT, genius.

When we moved into this house, we paid an absolute fortune to have all the trim sanded and painted in multiple Victorian colors.  The warranty on the paint job is up.  Predictably, the paint has started peeling off the windowsills.  So I’m thinking.  This stuff works wonders on my nails, makes a paint job last for ages.  Maybe I can cover the entire house in top coat?  Using that tiny brush? Hold on, I think my compulsive side just had an orgasm.

Dr. Phil.  I can’t remember what I really wanted to say about this.  Only that I was watching the program last night, I was being held hostage on the couch by the mice from the pantry, Lilliputian style, and couldn’t reach the remote, and just wonder why some of these people agree to go on the show.  I mean, the ones who are clearly assholes and yet somehow are comforted by demonstrating such assholic tendencies in front of a national audience.  And in syndication.  And how Dr. Phil doesn’t bitch-slap them back to the seamy cesspool they came from within the first 45 seconds.  I guess that would leave another 29 minutes and 15 second of show to fill. Wait, make that another 8 minutes, because the rest of the show is commercials.  He talks for one minute and goes to commercial.  Dr. Phil, I think you need to reprioritize how many times you think your audience needs to see Lysol and Hot Pocket adverts in the space of a half hour.  I’m going to do all I can get you the help you need to get better…will you take it?

Once we hit the one-year mark with Emerson, we wake up every day to find a different child sitting in my baby’s crib.  One with teeth exploding in his face, who gives body-hurling hugs and sweet kisses, who eats curry and lasagna and chocolate milk and spicy turkey burgers.  A kid who refuses to perform on command, saving his bye-bye’s for 15 minutes after the grandparents leave, but who has fallen in love with clocks and bellows “COCK? COCK! ” repeatedly at every blessed time-keeping device (and thermostats, and produce scales and church steeples) within a five-mile radius.  We’re pretty sure he’s willfully leaving out that one important consonant. 

This new kid walks, runs, laughs like crazy, climbs the furniture, is weirdly obsessed with putting bras on his head and has summarily rejiggered every electronic device in the house with his incessant button-pushing.  He dances to REM, Rufus Wainwright, the South Pacific soundtrack and opera.  He’s a pint-sized, 25 pound sponge sucking every bit of life and learning into himself every waking moment.  It’s exhilarating, heartwrenching, joyous and exhausting, by all accounts your average, run-of-the-mill toddler experience.

For me? I’m not sure I can say I’ve got a lot to show for myself. I’m enjoying the work at home gigs, doing marketing work for a consulting firm and as a project manager for a Web design company.  I’m finding it harder to be disciplined than I thought, there is always something shiny to distract myself with.  I’m also remembering how lonely it can be, even with constant email, telephone and IM contact with colleagues.  There is something to be said for a daily am shower, a sharp outfit, a fresh coat of face paint and hurling oneself out into the cold morning to go to an office.  Luckily, there are just enough client meeting and association powwows to recall what a staggering pair of heels and the absence of a ponytail feels like.

Despite working less and having more family time, my stress level has racheted up a few notches.  This is what happens with parenthood, it seems, all worries and anxieties draw into laserlike focus on one chubby, drooling target, and there is no off switch.  Not even after a healthy gin and tonic.  Or three.  The result has been the development of an outrageous case of hypochrondria. Absolutely ridiculous, completely irrational, impossible to deny.  At one point my eye-twitch mutated to such as extent that the entire side of my face seized up…which of course led me to believe I had Bell’s Palsy (oh, Dr. Google, I curl my obsessively searching fingers into a fist and shake in your direction).  Luckily, once you smack some sense into yourself, you realize that your face doesn’t hurt so much as it goes quite pleasantly numb.

I think one of the reasons I stopped writing was that I was finding it difficult to maintain a running monologue on daily life.  There is so much about Emerson I want to keep to myself, as if sharing it somehow diluted the purity of each new experience.  How exquisite the sound of “apple” is to me, when he points it out for the first time, makes my heart explode. Outside of our little family, it is a hot steaming cup of banal commentary.  And that’s OK.  I just need to redirect a bit and I’ve been thinking about how to do that.  I purchased a new domain recently, and have been working on getting a new design. I’ve gone back to the gym and started working out again, even going back for another round of punishment with Mistress Kate, the personal trainer.  I’m trying to get out more, be a little less cynical in general, a little kinder to my husband, a bit dialed down on the neuroses…but let’s not get crazy here.

Life is good, even when I’m convinced I have some weird glandular disorder and am going into renal failure. But I won’t deny it, there are days when I have thoughts of packing a bag and fleeing to London for some other imagined lifestyle. But every morning, 7 am, I am reminded.  Life is good, it’s here and it is right this second.

I read his obituary over and over, and still can’t wrap my mind around it.  This can’t be true. Maybe because of the sheer unbelievable nature of the accident, I can’t believe he is gone.  How could it have happened?  I cannot imagine what he went through and my maybe self-serving hope is that he did not suffer.  That he passed out, or hit his head and was taken quickly. No pain. No fear.

For some reason I was convinced that, when a loved one died, there would be a cosmic tap, a sudden hollowness in that space in your heart where their spirit rested.  That there’s no way someone could die and you’d still be thinking of them, tipping back a few at the local bar, sauntering through town, planting spring bulbs and just on the other side of the telephone, ready for a glass of wine and a long conversation.

Tim was a quiet, caring and generous man, so willing to love others and to be loved.  He was a brilliant garden designer, something that started as a hobby and was able to make his business.  He was so passionate about plants, trees, flowers, loved English gardens, and knew the common and Latin names for everything around him.  We used to walk through various local gardens in the area, him zigzagging down paths to touch all the trees and flowers, naming them for me.  He was an integral part of Lambertville for me, everyone knew him, and you could count on seeing him, a book in name and a ready smile, at a coffee shop, pub or just enjoying the day in his own garden or talking with a friend somewhere in town. 

For several years, we were constant companions, flirting often, more than that when the mood struck, but always a deep and abiding friendship.  We had such similar tastes, and his aesthetics in art, music and literature have been such big influences for me. A quick glance around my house proves this, the rooms are littered with gifts and books received over the years.  You could guarantee that on your birthday or, hell, any old day, you could open your front door to find an exotic blossom, a book, a bottle of wine, a copy of Weird NJ magazine (yes, an oxymoron, I know) or some other trinket to tell you know were in his thoughts.  He was always thinking about what would please and surprise his friends.

We had a falling out several years ago, a particularly boozy New Year’s Eve during which he demanded to know why we weren’t together. Why? I don’t know...as much as I loved him as a friend, I wasn’t in love with him.  It didn’t end well and it took a long time before we truly started talking again. But, as always, eventually we did.

After Emerson was born, I realized it had been, couldn’t have been, a year since we’d last spoke.  I meant to call him for his fortieth birthday, late in September, but forgot.  Then, during my birthday weekend in L’ville last month, I hoped to run into him. For the first time, I didn’t see him.  Walking past his house, both Michael and I noticed that, while the house looked the same, didn’t the garden seem a bit overgrown?  Maybe there was that cosmic tap, tapping on me, but I wouldn’t have ever imagined the truth.  Finally, I wanted to double-check his home address online and whammo. Cosmic sledgehammer.

And now it’s too late.  He was cremated, back to the earth he loved to work in. Tim, I’m so sorry I didn’t know. I still can’t believe you are gone. And I wasn’t there to say good-bye.  I waited so long, knowing we would catch right back up like we always did.  I miss knowing that you are in the world.  It is a surreal reality. I won’t wait so long with others in my life.  That, perhaps, is your final gift.  And I hope you are digging up some fine specimens in the gardens of your afterlife.  I’m sure the roses there are beautiful.

everything that I said I’d do
like make the world brand new
and take the time for you
just got lost and slept right through the dawn
and the world spins madly on

I thought of you and where you’d gone
and the world spins madly on.
(The Weepies)

There’s the lack of confidence I have in my writing.  Even on these blog entries, I often wring imaginary hands over whether a post has a point worth reading and then I agonize whether I’ve even made a point at all. There are some things, professionally, that I think I do quite well.  I’ve never thought of writing as one of my primary talents.  What’s funny is that some friends and associates might say exactly the opposite.  This whole current work situation has left me gun-shy and completely void of any confidence in my abilities.  I recognize this, but when you are basically being shown the door, it’s difficult to maintain the perspective that being made redundant isn’t necessarily your fault.  It’s the way business rolls sometimes and you’ve just got to dust yourself off, put on a big smile and start handing out the resume again.

Bottom line is that it’s a great opportunity and I’m terrifying of boredom and failure.  It’s the downfall of my generation I suppose, to look at a gorgeous diamond and yawn over the fact that, while nice, it’s not cut quite the way I hoped it would be.  There’s a part of me that feels like she should be doing, I don’t know…something else.  Something outside the golden hamster wheel of the corporate world.  What that is I can’t begin to guess.

But, while I navel-gaze about my true calling, I have a family to provide for.  And maybe, if I actually get an offer, taking this job could turn out ot be great and give me a chance to really build up some writing cred.  And also maybe, I can do it for a while and decide to move on.  Nothing is ever set in stone, right?

OK, don’t laugh, but I’m trying to go about this a bit differently. I’ve started carrying around a mini-cassette recorder.  I don’t have much free time and the things I want to write about seem to come at exactly the time when I have nothing to write with. And when I do, pen poised, it’s kind of like that incredible dream you forget seconds after you wake up.  You know it was absolutely brilliant, but you have no clue what the hell happened.

I don’t want to keep away from Karmatown.  It may be pathetic, but what makes me incredibly sad is seeing people take me off their links.  Lost cause, and so on.  My thoughts have been one long continuous blog post and it’s driving me crazy.  I turned 34 on Saturday.  I watched a community bury five little girls. Michael and I discussed a five year plan for moving.  Work has been a screaming stress nightmare. I look haggard. My fingernails are a mangled, throbbing mess.

So back to the symptom. I’ve shut down, army-crawling through the days in survival mode.  My personality booked a one way ticket to warmer climes and I helped her pack a bag. Care for child, work ass off, care for child, drool in front of television, drink wine, sleep.  Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

I’m hoping this leaf out there with infinite sides to turn to, because I could use a kick-start. Slowly. Here I come.

*Thanks, Mookie.  I haven’t written you either.  But that doesn’t mean I haven’t meant to…surely that’s got to count for something?