Pumping Gas Gets Real

Andrew has an aversion to pumping gas.  At various intervals, I find myself generously given the suggestion to be the one to drive his car and spend some time alone in an evening.  This is a luxury for me as a homeschooling parent who otherwise gets very little time without other people.  Each time I eagerly accept and typically spend an absurd amount of time wandering through book stores or Target or chatting on the phone to friends across the country.  And then I check the gas tank in the car, and it's miraculously on E just about every time.

Lately, I'd been switching it up so that Andrew got a taste of his own medicine.  He'd had to fill my van's tank the last couple of times as well as his own.  So he declared that he would take our son home from the restaurant, where we had met for dinner, in his car (with a half full tank) while I got gas in the van.  Fine.  The game was up, and by rights it was my turn.

I drove a block up the road, and my favorite gas pump was blocked by a large SUV, so I went around to the other side of the station and parked.  I did the awkward juggle between getting the car ready, answering the endless question prompts interrogating me about all of my life preferences and seemingly judging me for not wanting a car wash.  "I'll do it later!  Eventually!"

Finally, success!  The gas is pumping, and I'm trying to look casual and unconcerned as a trio of 20-something men sit a few yards away in a running car, waiting for their 4th to finish making a purchase inside.  With nothing much else to do, we are trying not to stare at one another and cause unnecessary social interaction, despite that I'm facing toward them.

Suddenly, I felt a tickle on my chest.  I noticed that my hair was pulled back, and my necklace was stationary.  My overshirt didn't have a collar in that area.  I glanced down during my super-casual gas pumping activity and noticed something decidedly foreign.  So, naturally, I calmly flipped the hell out and knocked at this freakish attachment to me, hoping with intensity that it wouldn't fall down and get wedged in my cleavage.  The world has some small mercies within it, and my foreign invader fell to the ground while I double checked to ensure that I hadn't just generated some life-threatening sparks.

About this time, I became aware of some nervous laughter directed my way from the waiting car.

"You okay?"

I checked myself. "Yeah."  Looking at the ground, I oh-so-coolly tried to gesture with my free hand at the ENORMOUS COCKROACH that I had just knocked off of myself.

"You spill gas?"

"No, I just had this bastard of a beastie land on me.  Can you see how huge it is?"

Laughter from them, though I could tell they were trying to be polite and working at stifling it.  The kind of laughter that says, "I'm not laughing at you; I'm laughing with you, even though you aren't laughing at all yourself."

Apparently I was show worthy at this point, and at least one of them kept a weather eye on me from then on, just in case anything else exciting happened.  For my part, I was eagle-eyeing the vile creature who had encroached upon my personal space.  NOT COOL.

Soon afterward, their 4th member came out of the store and seemed to be saying hello to me.  I did not know him, but I gave a sort of half-laugh, half-response that indicated that I was paying attention if he was talking to me.  Meanwhile, he was giggling fiercely.  At my expense?  I could not tell.  But it felt like it.

Ceasing my pumping duties, I got back in the van and twitched out for a while until calling my sister.  She was appropriately commiserative and soothed me into relative calm with her sympathy.

Arriving home a few minutes later, I recounted the story to Andrew.  His response?

"That's why I don't like to be the one to get the gas."

Bedtime Helpers

My son, Jackson, is five years old, and he has a phenomenal imagination.  To the point of excess.  Because I am in a position to allow him, in part by virtue of homeschooling, he daydreams typically for 2 or 3 hours a day, sometimes more.  Much of this occurs as he is waking up, eating, riding in the car, or lying in bed, waiting for sleep.

Before bedtimes, we've evolved many practices to help him adjust to a resting state.  Story time is still a major part of this, and for much of the past two years, so has been Happy Thought.  Happy Thought began initially as a means of warding off bad dreams, caused by negative images and experiences Jackson had had, including things from kids being mean or rude to episodes of Scooby Doo watched in the kid's club at the gym.  It was a highlight reel of the day's events, capped by a rough outline of the expectations for the next day. Eventually, HTs became more (by demand) a full re-cap of the day, including even unpleasant encounters just as much as pleasant ones. However, Jackson has become so adept at getting himself to sleep, he has been asking for no more Happy Thought.  HT absence periods have happened before, so I don't know if this is permanent, but he tells me it is.  He feels he has advanced beyond them.

His daydreams feel every bit as potent to him as sleeping dreams, every bit as rich and as real, and ordinarily, he has great control over them.  He has adapted over the past 5 and a half years to where he can readily transition in and out of dreams to answer questions, eat another bite of food, or ask a question to clarify some point that will help him in his dream scenario, e.g. "Why does Ariel's dad yell at her?" or "Why did Dorothy kill the Wicked Witch of the West?"  Then he slips right back into whatever story he was reliving or concocting.

Yet for all that he is maturing, bad dreams do occur...often while he is still awake.  Recently, he has been asking for help again with dream modulation.  Sometimes I have given him images of flying through the sky on bubbles, through rainbows and waterfalls.  Sometimes I have had him swim with dolphins through underground caves.  But I felt he needed a new tool, so last week, I gave him a dream turtle.  The idea came to me, admittedly, from looking at the star-shaped lights on the ceiling, coming out the back of a battery-powered light-up turtle that he uses as a sleep aid.  (Honestly, my husband loves that thing even more than Jackson does.)  So I used my right hand to rub the back of my left hand and let him try it on his own hand.  I said this was a dream turtle.  If you rub it during a dream, magic sparkles of gold will shoot out and make prismatic rainbows all across the sky, changing anything unpleasant into something more desirable.  When Jackson expressed concern about losing the dream turtle, I supplied him with an imaginary pocket on his right side.

Contented, Jackson has enjoyed his dream turtle and used it frequently.  He's told me how helpful it's been, having a dream turtle.  But tonight, it wasn't enough.  I dusted his dream turtle.  I gave it food.  But still, it wasn't doing the trick.  He couldn't get the right person in his dream.  So I said I had what he needed.  But I would only loan it to him; he would need to return it to me tomorrow.

"I have a whale,"  I said.  "It's a baby one.  It has a lot of blubber to help it stay warm in the coldest of ocean depths."

"So, that means it's really well protected?  It can defend itself?" Jackson wondered.

"Yes, and it heals really well, too, so even if it gets attacked by a shark or a T. Rex, as long as it gets away, it can heal up and get all better again.

"It's a kind of Peter Pan whale," I continued.  "My baby whale lives in a place like Neverland, so it never has to grow up.  It can always stay young and small.  And it's very smooth on the outside.  Sometimes," I giggled, "he lets me stand on his blowhole, and he'll spray a bunch of water."

"So then you fly up in the air a long ways?!"  Jackson was getting the hang of it.

"Yes, and then I splash down again.  Then I swim back to my whale or sometimes he swims over to get me."

"What else?"  Oof.  I wasn't being let off that easily.

"Well, I have a secret to tell you, but you can't tell anyone."

"Why not?"

"Because then they'd all want my baby whale for their own!"

"Okay."

"My baby whale," I whispered, "can fly!  Do you remember the whales from Fantasia 2000?"

"Yeah."

"My baby whale, he's a humpback whale just like them, and he can fly just like them, too.  But it's a secret.  Sometimes, if I have my space suit with me, I ride on his back, and we fly together up to the edge of space.  We like to just sit there, above the clouds, and look at the stars.  And then some days we fly all around and make shapes out of the clouds so people will see them and try to figure out what they are...only they don't know my whale and I made them."

"Like what?"

"Well, sometimes we make shapes like cats, or tables, or peanut butter sandwiches."  Admittedly, I could have come up with better shapes.

"Then what?"

"We are really careful so people don't see us, and then we head back down.  My whale likes to do tricks in the air, too, so sometimes he does loops.  And he loves to do freefalls where we just fall straight down for a while."  Here I made a sound like my face was being blown all around by wind.

"Do you hold on?"

"I have to!  Otherwise I'd fall off.  And sometimes I do, because my whale is really slippery and usually wet, but he catches me if I slide off.  Then we go back into the water.  He's very gentle about that, surprisingly."

"Mom...I might forget to give your whale back tomorrow."

"I'll have to try to remind you then."

And then I left, daydreaming recommenced, and now, at last, he is asleep.

Mission: Accomplished.

And in case you need to borrow my baby whale, remember:  he likes to sleep on your left side.

There is always time

There is always time for death.

Procrastinate.  Put it off.  Don't rush dying.

Yes, you can rage against the dying of the light and all that.  But it's more than that.  Don't wish it.  Don't hope for it.  Don't expect it by some arbitrary date.  Don't just sit around waiting for the inevitable.

It IS inevitable, to be sure, but that's no reason for not living a complete life.

There is always time for Death.

Death can wait for you.  For Death, there is always time.

Keep Death waiting.  Take your time.  Die later.  Much later.

Live.  Breathe.  Be.

There is always time for Death.  This is the only time for Life.  Embrace it.  Cherish it.  Live it.  Live it now.

Embrace Life.  Do it now.

Oh, hi there

It's been a while, I suppose.  (Understatement, what?)

What have I been doing?  Well, I'm so glad you asked!

I did take rather a long break between posts, admittedly.  I haven't been writing much, which is truly regrettable.  But I've been watching videos and reading books and inspiring quotes and watching Whisper of the Heart and spending time with creatively oriented people, and it's all sort of helping funnel me back to doing what I love.

And I so love writing.  I have this imaginary captive audience that unwittingly attends to my thoughts.  I don't mean to say by this that I think you are imaginary, because to make sense of all these pixels, you clearly must have some sort of comprehension ability.  I believe in you!

There is this audience that is available any time of day or night, and all they have to do is find my writing (or, as often as not, have it thrust into their perceptive regions rather closely), and my words become this little train not so much chugging as flowing into the mind of another.  How amazing is that?

For whom do I write?  I write for you.  At the moment, you is me.  You may always only be me.  Ergo, I write for me.

Let me un-derail for a moment to help fill the lost audience in on some particulars of my present circumstances.  I'm doing the whole SAHM thing, homeschooling my miniature giant.  I love it.  But...(grr, don't DO that!) there is more to me than "teacher".  There is more to me than "mother".  There is more to me than "wife".  There is a whole world inside of me, all of the people I can be, all of the places I can visit, all of the experiences I can ever wish to have.  This universe in me wants to be set down in type, and it's selfish of me to keep it closed, locked, hindered.  Sharing is what it wants.

So now, I have found my outlet.  Writing is a thing I have always loved, but I have always struggled to find what I wanted to say.  Thus I end up with loads and loads of meta-writing.  One can only endure so much of that, don't you agree?  (Yes, yes, as a matter of fact, I do.)  What is this outlet, you query?  Well, it's a writers' guild.

Oooooh, you say, aren't you getting fancy.  When I say writers' guild, I mean 3 of us sat down one night and talked about writing, and then spent an hour solid just writing part of our respective novel projects.  It was GLORIOUS--even more glorious than the doddering old man with the crisp Batman shirt.  I felt so alive, so rejuvenated, and I spent HOURS of my time with scarcely even a reference to my life as a wife, mother, and homeschooling parent who occasionally has to think a few moments too long to remember her own name:  For a span of time, I was just a Writer.

"Just".  Hah!  What an amazing medium writing is!  You can read my thoughts, or what you said last Tuesday, or see a description of something you were unable to hear or touch or experience first-hand.  You can read about other worlds or about studies of our own.  You can read how it feels to be a woman dwelling in sorrow or a child elated by sugary foods or the ecstasy of intercourse.  You can read directions for poaching chicken or building a house.  You can read about how to be a better reader or a better writer, how "they" make just about anything, how to get to San Jose, how the West was "Won", how Lincoln was shot or the pyramids built.  You can read how to paint or draw or make sculptures of ice, iron, clay, or wax.  You can read a play that you have never seen performed and imagine it all in your mind, just as it would be in so-called real life.

And if I can keep this up (I think I can; I think I can; I think I can), I may finally believe the myth that people can do everything.  I somewhat doubt it, though, as my sink is full of dirty dishes that have been there at least a week.  Also, when I recently asked Jackson why he hasn't played with his toy vacuum much lately, he said it was because he prefers to use it when I vacuum and that I haven't done that in a long time.  (The delightful honesty of children.  Oof.)  And let's not even mention the declining state of the master bathroom.

Still, my child is learning, growing, and intact.  Since my goals with him are to keep him Safe, Healthy, and Educated, I'd say that's going well.  My home is...functional.  The bills are being paid.  My spouse and I have moments in which we remember we are allowed to do spousal things (you know, like have pretend arguments about toothpaste and underpants).  And I am writing a novel.  Yes, it's the same one I mentioned nearly two years ago that I had plotted to write.

So, I am making progress, honing in on the characters I want in my novel.  In all, I am glad that I waited to write this.  I've had so many inspirations that I would not have had if I had pushed myself to write it sooner.  Now the delays I made for myself seem reasonable and sensible, rather than just exercises in procrastination.  The feeling that something was missing from it is lifting, and the proverbial creative juices are flowing.

To quote Shizuku Tsukishima's character from Whisper of the Heart, "Ahhh!  I love being a writer!"

What am I writing?  I am writing life.  I am writing death.  I am writing young.  I am writing old.  I am writing healthy.  I am writing broken.  I am writing normative.  I am writing non-normative.  There is rebellion; there is love; there is fear; there is anger; there is insecurity; there is intrigue; there is denial; there is acceptance.

The only thing left to do, really, is to figure out how all the bits of these elements entangle.  To complete the weaving of the web such that suspension of disbelief is so gentle as to be unperceived.  There is humor, and there is sorrow.  There is...sort of a beginning.  And soon I hope to write The End.

...The End.

Inspirations provided in part by:
The Element by Sir Ken Robinson
Be An Artist - Right Now! by Young-Ha Kim (watch the video in upper right corner)

With acknowledgements to Smeagol and J. Alfred Prufrock.  Also a cursory nod to Dickens, whether he deserves it or not.