Flying

 

Two nights ago, I had one of those dreams where you wake up, but you’re still asleep. I tried to fully wake by attempting to fling over on my side. But I stayed in the dream and just rolled off the side of the bed. I got up and saw Kiki in the doorway. She wore her pink pajama set, which she often wears, and it looked like she was waiting for me.

We walked through the house to the back door and excitedly opened the sliding door to go outside. The backyard looked different. There were little white lights strung around everywhere, and a huge deck with fire pits and TVs hung up. I sat in a chair in front of a fire pit and said to her, “I’m so happy we're in this dream together.”

She replied, “This isn’t a dream.”

I jumped from the chair I was sitting in and flew high into the sky, to show her it was a dream. I flew over the yard and then hovered above the house, looking back at her. Then she flew up into the sky, too.

Then I woke up. The next morning, I told my daughter about the dream, and I asked her, “Did you have the same dream?”

It felt right. The dream left me feeling so amazing. She told me no, and added something about how ridiculous the question is.

I’ve had the kids for most of this month, and it’s been lovely to have them all the time. The only extracurricular is G's soccer. He is new to the game, and he’s picking it up. I get antsy watching. My body reacts when I see the ball being kicked around as if I could pull some puppet strings attached to the players. 

When I played soccer in middle school, I was, without question, the worst player on the team. The only person who was thrilled to have me on the team was the second-to-worst person. Everyone else was indifferent because I never could mess a game up in a critical moment, since I’d be watching from the bench. It didn’t faze me, and I had fun hanging out with my friends.

G’s soccer games can be intense because the kids are damn good at soccer. They're juggling that ball, and bouncing it off their heads, and I’m at the sidelines doing the dog pound chant from Arsenio Hall. Some of the parents are cut from a different cloth. I smell their militant self-discipline. 

I was once reading my book while the team warmed up, and listened to this dad talk about his son to some other parents. He said, “He is reaching a limit. He has continued to be top of his class academically, and he has two hours of practice every night and four games a weekend.”

This explains why they're all so good, playing in multiple leagues each season. Whatever they did to their kids early on to make them get in line, I commend. I start screaming at my kids to put their shoes on thirty minutes before we actually leave, otherwise we will be late. One hour of homework has to be rewarded with two hours of TV. We are finally at a point where I can believe them when they tell me they don't have homework, after two years of parent-teacher conferences, where one time my daughter said to the teacher, in front of me, that I am too trusting. My jaw dropped.

I get it, though. When I get home, I don't want to work. The minute I walk in the door, I change into pajamas. My daughter does the same, usually the pink set. If I didn’t have to worry about one day finding a man because my kids will move out in five years, I'd probably only eat ice cream sandwiches and have a full wardrobe of matching sweatsuits. I don’t think I will find one at a soccer game, even though it is the height of my social life these days.

The kids are going to their dad’s this weekend, so I can say goodbye to these dishpan hands at the same time as I say goodbye to them in the morning, but I already miss them. Tonight, when I walked into Kiki's room to say goodnight, I said, “That was my favorite dream. I think one day you’ll have that dream too. From your perspective. Why would we have to have it at the same time?”

She said, "I don't think we're that connected. Maybe it would happen with my dad."

Then I hit her over the head with a pillow, and she started laughing.

The Stapler

 

When I was young, I remember my dad screaming about his stapler. It was either missing or broken. My brothers and sisters treated his desk as a portal to our adulthood. Stapling, taping, and scribbling just like an adult does, working on whatever they're working on at their desk.

My Dad was plagued by five kids who had no idea that the stapler had a real purpose, and wasn’t just amazingly fun to play with. We committed other criminal acts at the home, such as when thumbtacks were discovered inside the VCR. I was the family graffiti artist, and as a child, I took to our family van with a Sharpie marker. I remember when I drew all over my dad’s briefcase, and I was at an age when I was learning how to hold a pen, so it was just violent scribbling.

I suppose a child psychologist could have really tapped a pen at their lip while looking at the scene, but my dad probably just gave a furious roar, and then sucked it up, carrying that desecrated briefcase back and forth to work each day till my mom bought him a new one for Christmas.

I’m approaching my fourteenth year of parenthood, and I have gone through at least ten staplers. No one acknowledges when they broke the stapler. I find out when I go to staple, and I press it down to no avail. I flip it open and see that some part of the mechanism is broken beyond repair, but the staples have been colored rainbow with Sharpie markers.

I still think my desk is a sacred space. I love pulling my chair right up to it, organizing papers, and putting my pens in their little mug. It’s funny because even though I work at my desk, I end up taking most of my Zoom meetings in my bed, so I’m not interrupted. This is when the desk is free for someone else to pull the chair up to it. Maybe to pretend to pay the water bill by hole-punching it and sticking it inside the printer.

The wall in our entryway has a hole in it because someone repeatedly swung the door open like they were Kramer running into Jerry’s apartment. My brother-in-law had to fix our bathroom floor because of mindlessly showering with the curtain on the outside of the tub. Currently, the kitchen table has clay cemented to it from a volcano mold.

Aside from a furious growl and then a sigh of defeat, there is not much I can do about it. Now I know to buy scissors in bulk because they might be inter-dimensional objects, put a stopper in front of the wall to protect it from the door, and always have a stash of paperclips on hand.

Nothing like the act of paper-clipping to calm my nerves and remind me that I am doing important things at my desk. It’s not quite as good as a stapler, but I’ll put a new one in my stocking at Christmas.

Cruising

 

The kids and I went cruising at the end of July. In the end, cruising is about swimming, sun, and food, so now I know, it is not necessary to fly halfway around the world to go on one.  A solo backpacker traveling through a foreign country may be able to envision themself as a sort of culture pirate, but when you are on a cruise, these delusions do not even cross your mind, as it feels more like a six-day field trip with an adult preschool.

Our trip started in Venice, a city exploding with tanned, shirtless men in jeans carting things about on a dolly with a cigarette hanging from their lips. Thousands of Streetcar-Named-Desire-Marlon-Brandos are busily moving about this city, making it gorgeous and functional. 

My kids were confused by the prevalence of cigarette smoking. They come from a generation where they’ve been conditioned to think smoking is as bad as shooting a rhinoceros. It was effectively nonexistent on TV for the last fifteen years, and if it weren't for vaping, it could have been wiped from young people’s lives.

After Venice, we got on the cruise, and it was fun in the Mediterranean sun. We’d go on exciting excursions, hot-tub at night, and have meals in the restaurant with our two exotic waiters. One of them loved Miami, Florida, and he’d loom around our table like a new kid at school wanting to pull up a chair. I’d feel him looking at me, and then when I’d look up, his eyes would dart away. I couldn’t tell if he was socially awkward or if it was me.

Around the fourth day into a vacation, I have to suppress the desire to say, “That was fun, I’m ready to go home now.” Because I don’t want to flip a switch where everything goes from exciting and new to old and dull, I prefer the gradual change of a dimmer knob.

I don’t drink, and my companions are twelve and thirteen years old, who will climb into a game and start talking about Bomb-bomb-bombing-goose and Tee-tee-tee-gas-whore, where I have no idea what's going on.

I’d go to the gym in the morning and walk around in the afternoon. Sometimes I’d sit in a chair on a deck that was in the middle of the boat. It looked out to the endless ocean. I’d drink coffee and feel like I was getting in touch with God, sending him a mental email that wasn’t about much more than the awe of vast nothingness.

I’d come back into the boat, and the exact opposite state of mind would take over. The ship, like an ant farm, appears choreographed. Walking on the pool deck in the evening, the swimming pool was the same color as a clogged toilet. The tanned, bloated bodies fanning out from the pool, splayed like gunned-down soldiers. A No Doubt cover band is taking care of the five-gun salute. This is humanity, I thought. This boat could sink, and it would make no difference in the world.

The trip home was an epic disaster. I will spare the play-by-play, but eighteen hours of flying was stretched into forty-eight. I didn’t get any sleep and looked like I hadn’t seen a shower in days. When we set out on this journey, I put on my cleanest clothes, but they were clean for a reason. My Jorts, oversized low-rise jean shorts that go below the knee, are something Gwen Stefani wore in the year 2000. I find them fashion-forward; my daughter finds them nauseating. 

When we were back in the States, I could call my sisters again. They tether me from a complete collapse of self, and they make me laugh. I told Lacey I was looking like a cactus-faced bum, and she told me to send her a picture. Kiki took a full-length shot of me, and the response was immediate. “Oh bitch, you’re wearing Asics!”

My older sister is a brain surgery nurse (I don’t know the technical term, but some high-pressure bad ass shit) and the only TV she watches is Disney Plus with her three kids, but for some reason, she has the banter of a seasoned RuPaul contestant. She saves this hilarious part of herself for her family. Sometimes our phone conversations are like finding buried treasure. I greedily cram as much of it into my memory as possible, knowing no one else will get to enjoy this.

My younger sister and her family went on a cruise out of San Francisco, and jealousy pulsated through my veins because they didn’t need to get on an airplane. When she came home, we compared our notes, and she commented on the number of people who were rascal-fat, incapable of walking, but zipping into that buffet room. I told her it sounded like the Steve Jobs movie, Wall-E, where they make fun of fat people for an hour and a half.

My cruise didn’t have that. Maybe it is just an American thing, and the flight would certainly kill anyone that size. There are a lot of people still smoking in Europe. Not vapes, but good-ol ciggies. Maybe the obesity epidemic in the US is correlated with the decline of cigarette smoking. It seems more likely to me than fast food because fast food isn’t just an American thing; it’s available all around the world.

This will all start to change with GLP-1s, and to be honest, I’m fucking jealous. I wish I could get on one; it would be amazing to have no appetite, one less thing to think about. I don’t care if I become terrifyingly thin like Karen Carpenter, so fragile I’d need to use a rascal for fear my bones would snap when I swat a fly away from my decaying body.

After we came home from our trip, I had a month before my summer vacation ended. I’m working on multiple writing projects that I planned to tackle, but without a deadline, I flailed. I watched eight hours of TV a day, read ten books, and snacked like there was no end to my appetite. I chew my stupid nicotine gum with such ferocity, I’ll probably end up with the jawline of a pit bull. 

On a cruise ship, it is an effort not to dwell on the thought that the ship could sink. I fell asleep each night thinking about it. My plane route home resembled a bulletin board in a CSI room. I had no control, and after a while, I succumbed to the thought that this could all be leading up to my plane crashing. This all makes smoking a cigarette very appealing. 

I spent the last month lying on my couch like a sunbaked sea lion. I never truly enjoyed it, afraid I was making myself more and more creatively stunted with every minute I delayed writing. However, like a switch being flipped, I woke up this morning in a different state of mind. I go back to work tomorrow, and there’s so much for me to get done. 

Dead Bird

 

When I came home from visiting my parents, my house was like a sauna. Three days of no AC in the hundred-degree heat will make inanimate objects look like they’re fighting for their life.

After I turned on the air, I walked into the kitchen and saw bird feathers scattered about like a pillow exploded. I knew it wasn’t a pillow, but the work of my savage cat, Midnight. Bird poop was speckled about the floor like a Jackson Pollock, but I didn’t find the bird.

I cleaned up the crime scene and assumed the cat took the bird back outside after she used my kitchen as a canvas for a kindergartener’s art project.

Right as I peeled off my yellow kitchen gloves, the power went out. This is common when it gets hot, and I used the last bit of daylight to get myself sorted. Most of the time, when the power goes out, my phone battery is at 15% so I can’t watch Netflix. I read by flashlight, nodding in and out of sleep, while sweat beads on my forehead. It looks like I’m fighting Malaria, but it’s just a night without modern amenities.

The next morning, with power restored, I drank my coffee and googled “What does it mean to find a dead bird in a house?” Even though I didn’t find the dead bird. I’m superstitious, and I hoped this was a sign of good fortune.

I ended up on Reddit, the last place on the internet that isn’t taken over by robots. There are conflicting opinions on the dead bird, so I skipped over the “bad omens” comments and read the “new beginnings” comments.

After being validated by unqualified whack-a-doos, I moved on to my favorite subreddit,  /witches. I am not a witch, nor have I tried witchy practices, but it’s wildly entertaining; them witches be crazy.

If I were a witch, I’d sleep on a bed made of gold bars, look like Margot Robbie, and pay off everyone’s houses. These witches are struggling to make ends meet and are devastated by some asshole in their lives. It’s a lot like the old soap opera Passions.

It’s not all entertainment. Sometimes I pick up a piece of useful information. When my daughter goes off on someone, I stop her before she goes full-Midnight and say, “Don’t wish anything bad on someone because it can come back on you times three.”

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, because she believed me.

My daughter likes Reddit too, and uses my phone to leave comments on American Dad and Taylor Swift subs. This type of activity is immediately disqualifying me from any serious corporate position, but I probably already did that with the Witch sub. Take that, Big Brother.

The most treasured app of my children is YouTube. After they came home from their dad’s, they were laughing about a song. They played it for me, and I took it in like a media analyst. I said, “That is very funny… but it seems preeeetty racist. I guess it all depends on what the guy looks like who made it.”

They don’t see it that way. Like true free-speechers, they weren’t going to let a good look in the horse’s mouth legitimize its humor. 

I repeated one line from the lyrics as an example of questionable intent, but the way I said it sounded more like I agreed. They laughed at me, and G said, “I’m going to tell my dad.”

“Go ahead.” I added, “Your dad is the most racist person I know… that’s why I married him.”

While we all giggled, my attention was pulled to a white drop of paint, like Jackson Pollock, on top of a couch cushion. I looked around and saw a few more. I leaned my head over the side of the couch, and there lay a dead bird.

“Oh my God! There’s a dead bird! This is fantastic!”

They rushed over to get a good look. I picked it up with an old Amazon package to put it in the outside trash, and said, “Do you know what this means? It’s a sign from the spirit world. We can expect new beginnings.”

Geoffrey shook his head, no, and my daughter asked to use my phone.

As I steam-cleaned the couch, I was quite impressed at how spotless my house was looking because of this dead bird. Then it dawned on me, “Is this the new beginning? A clean house!”

I heard the flap of our tiny dog door. My familiar, Midnight, coming back from God knows where.

Judge-Mental

 

Dating apps must be bad for karma because the task of chucking someone out based on how they look makes me feel like shit. Sometimes the decision is easy, like when a man’s profile picture is a selfie taken from his belly button, and he looks like someone who spends a lot of time on the dark web.

After judging their picture, it’s off to the one to three sentences they write about themselves. Some don’t bother, which is a shame because I have to make up who they are in my mind completely, and I go to extremes, either giving them a long rap sheet or plaque for best-person-of-the-year. 

One person wrote, “I am looking for a woman who isn’t evil.” He looked like the kind of guy who’d punch someone in the face in line at a water park for not saying ‘excuse me’ after bumping shoulders; volatile, short-fused, and oddly particular about manners.

Once there’s a match, we move to messaging. I am conscious that most people don’t spend hours at night reading and their days scribbling notes of funny thoughts or observations to use during a carved-out writing time when their kids are at their dad’s house, so it’s alright if it’s basic.

When someone asks how my day was, I give an anecdote from the day. On Tuesday, I got some good mileage telling people how I accidentally set a bag of groceries on fire when I placed the bag on the stovetop. I came back from the car with the remaining bags, and my kitchen was full of smoke. 

One person replied, “You’re sexy,” and it made me hate him so much more than the person who replied, “neat.”

One guy blocked me after asking me what I thought about the app, and I wrote, “My cousin recommended this app after I told him the one I had used was full of disgusting perverts. In the previous app, 90% of the men looked like convicts, and in this app, it’s more like 70%. I haven’t gone out on any dates yet, but I have one set up for Sunday, but honestly, I can’t tell if that guy is part of a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.”

It was too real, or too negative, or maybe he is a part of the cryptocurrency influencer community.

I canceled the date for Sunday because my horoscope has been adamant about me listening to my intuition. After I reread the message chain between us, there were multiple red flags that I might be repeating an old pattern. He was (1) an artsy guy, who (2) talked about the many irons in the fire, one of which was (3) just about to take off. Reading that third one sent a shiver down my spine. My sister even agreed, “He’s almost 50, that mother fucker should already be flying.”

It’s hard to be so judgmental, and it feels gross to have negative emotions for someone I don’t even know. I think I could be carrying the negativity around with me.

I was substitute teaching in Special Ed last week. I was instructed to sit on the right side of the class, where the “biters” sat. One of the aids showed me a horrible scar on his forearm where a kid clamped down on him earlier in winter. The boy they said did this looked like a cherub-angel-child, and I loved how he’d smile at the moving clouds and delight in a swaying tree branch.

The kid I sat next to was nonverbal, and he went onto his iPad and pushed a button that said, “ugly.” My gosh, that was hurtful. Then he did it again. I listened to The Telepathy Tapes, so I was led to believe this kid could be thriving in an alternate dimension, and he’s seeing my higher self with all its judgmental warts and decided to read me. I put my sweater on to protect my forearms, but it turned out to be unnecessary - he stopped slagging me off.

I read people’s reactions to The Telepathy Tapes on Reddit. There are two distinct camps among the people who are willing to write about it. I can’t say I fully embrace either side, but it is interesting and cool to think about.

While on Reddit, I received a notification that someone replied to a comment. I don’t comment on Reddit, but my daughter does. She was defending Taylor Swift and damning some guy named Scooter who screwed her over.

When I asked her about this guy, she clenched her teeth and told me she hated him. I said, “Don’t you think you should save your hate for someone you have a closer connection to?”

She said, “Fuck Scooter.”

So I said, “Yeah, fuck that guy,” because were family, so I hate who she hates. Maybe that’s a better use of my hate, and helpful for my karma.

Hold On

 

I make a point of not giving advice because I’m utterly terrible at it. Once a friend confessed to me she was cheating on her husband and was doing cocaine regularly, and I suggested she listen to Hold On by Wilson Philips.

So when students come into my office, with a wide range of personal problems, I listen thoughtfully, and the most I say is a generic plea for them to keep at it and stay strong. Lately, I’m finding I have to do this with coworkers who are forced to pivot careers after recent budget cuts.

A colleague came into my office to chit-chat about her situation, and she stopped mid-sentence after doing a double-take when looking at my whiteboard. She asked, “Are those tampons?”

Lined up on the little silver tray at the bottom of the board were four tampons I forgot to put in my purse. She said they look like dry-erase markers anyway.

The school has free period products. I take pads and tampons from the gym too. The pads from the gym are a last resort, but they’ve come in handy during a pinch. They are about an inch thick and very sad in length. You better not shift in your seat wearing one of them, or it's bound to be disastrous.

Kiki saw the complimentary products in their smartly packaged cardboard containers, lining the bottom of my tote bag, and said, “You’ll take every tampon in town that isn’t nailed down.”

This made me laugh, but I defended myself and my choices. “Darling, these programs are meant to be used. Women should always have access to these products. Besides, I pay a lot of money for our gym. This hardly makes up for the stretches of time when I don’t utilize my membership.”

Over the last month, I was way too busy to go to the gym, although it would have helped with stress management. I passed out final exams in one of my classes and told my students I’m absorbing their stress because I had a cold sore, and my eye started twitching.

I’m sure a helpful hippie woman could easily diagnose me, but I’m a walking sponge of other people’s energy. By the end of the term, I’m interacting with 120 students daily, and I get to a point where I have my period twice a month. I enjoy maybe two days where I’m not PMSing. There’s got to be an easy fix, like sunglasses or a lead vest.

I read Chelsea Handler’s latest book, and she has the opposite problem. Where I will start my period if I’m around anyone on their’s, she has the power to give women periods from being around her. She calls herself an alpha-period, which makes me the most beta-period. I used to call myself superwoman from this strange phenomenon, thinking I’m tapped into the divine feminine energy, but maybe I’m just way too easygoing.

During the two-hour test, I read my book and kept an eye out for cheaters. My God, is that the most uncomfortable and sad situation to find myself in. My sister was texting me, too. Every day, she lets me know about her most recent bowel movement. I think it’s because she’s a nurse. After I give her congrats or condolences, I tell her about mine. She genuinely cares. We always conclude that everything is better when we eat three prunes a day.

She told me about my brother and his family visiting last weekend, and I told her about the kids and I visiting our parents and little sister. Over the weekend, we all ate dinner at my aunt's and uncle’s house. I told my uncle, “If you know of any single men to set me up with, I’m ready.”

He might have been looking at my cold sore when he replied, “Oh, ok.”

Then I went on describing the perfect person I was looking for, and he thoughtfully listened. When the get-together ended, we said our goodbyes. I grabbed my purse with a hundred tampons and queued up Wilson Philips for the car ride home.

Sometimes the advice you offer others is exactly what you need to hear yourself.