A very special Thursday Thirteen: It's time to go, hijita

Dear Diary (and grown child),


I'm not sure if you'll even see this, since you have little interest in what it is that I do, where I go, or what I think.

These tips and tricks are meant to be a guide to living in my house.  They are by no means all inclusive. They they may explain, however, why I'm beginning to take a rather passitve-aggressive and oftentimes aggressive-aggressive stance towards you as of late.

13.  Be Courteous.  You are not fulfilling me somehow by being here; in fact, my closest friends groaned when I told them you were moving in with me.  I am a person, with a life, pursuits, friends, hobbies, activities, routines, and interests.  Do not expect me to re-arrange to accommodate you. Once you are old enough to look me in the eye, you are no longer my precious baby, my hijita, my bundle of joy. You are a homeless person living in my house and eating my food.

12.  Be Real.  You've told me that your goal is to be a housewife.  I don't have a problem with that per se, but remember that you have to:
1) be a wife, and 2) have a house.

11.  Be Neat.   Don't leave wet towels on the floor.  Don't leave pee in the toilet.  Don't leave your makeup and toiletries all over.  It's not your bathroom.  It's my guest bath.  Don't take dishes in to the guest room.  Don't leave dishes in the guest room.  Don't put dirty dishes into the drawers in the guest room.  Don't call it your room...It's my guest room. Those are my dishes.  And goddamned it, MY ANTS.
This is not a hotel.  There is no maid service.


10.  Don't take my stuff.  My work is emotionally draining.  I sometimes have small amounts of certain comfort foods set aside and I come home to relax.  I may go for weeks without touching them but that doesn't mean it's open season on anything in the cabinet or fridge, or that you have free use of my ipod dock, or any of my stuff.  Recent examples: frozen shrimp, the provolone, my wheat thins, anything else I haven't discovered yet.

IT"S NOT AS THOUGH WE HAVEN'T ALREADY HAD THIS CONVERSATION ABOUT SIX TIMES.  


(And while we're at it, you didn't "find" it in the cabinet, because it wasn't "lost".)

9.  Plan Ahead.  Don't use up the mayonnaise, the catsup, the hot sauce, the tuna, toilet paper, paper towels, various clearing supplies, or any household stuff without telling me and tell me if we're about to run out.  I do not go to the store in the middle of the week.  Recent examples: AGAIN, WE'VE HAD THIS CONVERSATION 6 TIMES.

8. Get moving.   If I'm in the kitchen eating a peanut butter sandwich because I just ran eight miles, do not hint at how nice it would be if I made you one, too.  You don't even work out.  Go run eight miles, then, make your own sandwich.

7.  Quit bugging me about your virtual boyfriend.  He's not your boyfriend.  You don't know him.  You've never met him.  You've seen his picture, and talked on phone.  No, I don't have any advice for you on your recent spat.  Why?  BECAUSE I'VE NEVER MET HIM, AND NEITHER HAVE YOU.

6.  Get moving, Part 2.  Sitting on your ass all day on the internet turning in online applications is not "looking for a job."  Also, you don't get weekends off from being unemployed. 

5.  Be Courterous, Part 2.  Do not stay up until midnight and THEN decide to go do things in the kitchen.  The people who are supporting you are trying to sleep.

4.  Mine.  Not Yours. It doesn't matter if I have unlimited long distance and local; I am the one who pays the bill.  It's just plain rude to use my cell phone late at night after I've gone to sleep, or to spend hours on the house phone.

Yeah - it's all funny until the homicide squad arrives.

3.  WAKE UP.  Don't act put out when I wake you up in the morning by banging loudly on the guest room door.  Alarm clocks are simple to operate.  WAKE YOURSELF UP.

2.  It's my house, deal with it.  Do not presume to snicker or mock me or complain about how messy I am, how I leave cabinet doors open, or how loud I was last night.  And don't try to manipulate me; if you tell me you'll have to live in a shelter if I make you leave, I will merely offer tips and tricks to avoid being mugged.  By the way, you should be so lucky at age 46 to have something to be loud about.

 1.  Don't be such a drama queen.  Do not sing loudly enough along with Sarah McLaughlin while you're in the kitchen to wake the coyotes.  Don't post your angst about how I "treat" you on FaceBook...or how despondent you are over my latest tirade.  I'm a therapist, but I'm not your therapist.
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Sweetie, adults who live with their parents regress.  You have regressed.
It's time for you to move out.
It's time for you to move along.

Love, Mom.

...

Sorry I'm late, honey, but I can explain.

Dear Diary,

13.  I spent much of the week with some pals planning a surprise birthday party for Herself, the Dreadpirate Rackham.  She who turns 42 this year has been lacking a party in the recent past, and so we decided to pull this off.  And, it worked.  She had no idea.  She tried in vain to go train in Leadville this weekend, but mysteriously, nobody was available to go with her.  Buwahaha.

Anyway, there was cake, and snacks, and charbroiled meat.  All-in-all, a very good time.  Pictures to come.

12. Last weekend, I had a nice parenthood moment: I had a grownup-dinner with my grown-up oldest son.  We ate at an Indian Restaurant. It was nice, eating with another adult. It's interesting seeing the development that continues of a young person.  He has been having deep thoughts lately about human nature and electronic media, as well as self examination.

11. Thursday morning, the aforementioned oldest grabbed his inhaler, a pair of running shoes, and went for a run. 9.5 pace, not bad considering he's gained about 30 lbs and hasn't run in over a year. In fact, it kind of pisses me off; 19 minutes for 2 miles is something that I have to work hard to attain.  When he was a toddler, his pediatrician said that something about the way his knees were built meant he'd be a good runner. Maybe we'll see that happen.

10. In the tradition of food-themed runs. This Sunday night will be the Cherry Garcia run. yeah baby.  Oldest has decided to do it too.  

9.  Really?  You're only charging me $30 to inject vitamins  into my ass?  Vtamins I could take for 50 cents in pill form or a bowl of cereal?  Wow.  What a Bargain.

I want to say, "seriously, who pays for this?" but then again, I bought two months of some stupid stuff called "Sensa" in 2009.  I know that when you're heavy, sometimes you think, well, just maybe...I mean, they couldn't say it if it wasn't true, right?  And that really is what pisses me off about places that do things like this (above) know that people are that desperate.  They prey on people and their sad desperation. I want to take the charlitans and make them run. For, oh, say, about 26.2 miles.

8.  A couple weeks ago I had a bad morning.   I'd spent it at the local children's acute psychiatric ward at a hospital, where I met an 11-year-old girl who wanted to kill herself.  She had a plan and everything - slit her own throat with a kitchen knife. 

When I got to work, I told the director of Admissions I was feeling pretty low, and she sent me to a website.  Normally, that wouldn't do the trick, but this one actually did, so I'll share it: DAMN YOU AUTO CORRECT!

7.  The other thing is, I just didn't do much this week.  

I ran with a friend on Monday, but only about 1.88 miles.  She's a friend who is in the Guard, and is in danger of being kicked out because she keeps failing the physical fitness part.  So, I told her I'd run with her a cuople times per week.  

6.  Most of this week I relaxed, ate, and worked.  But tomorrow, I"m back at it again, starting from scratch as I work on both a marathon training plan and continue working on training for La Luz.

Why would I start over?  Well, I"m not actually starting over.  I'm starting at like the 4th week of the training plan, actually.  It's just that I'll be working on speed more over the coming months.  Tomorrow, I'm doing a run called the Cherry Garcia 10K, and yes, it is named precisely that for a reason.  Pizza and ice cream.

5. Then comes the Daughter.  She worked out with me for one week, and then did another final workout a week later with Women In Training, and then stopped.  She's continued to lose weight, slowly, mainly has to leave the house to look for work every day, and while it's true she just sits on the internet all day and "looks" for work, at least she isn't home to sit and eat all day (when I'm at home, the house is locked, and she doesn't have a key).  So, anyway, she heard there was pizza and ice cream and now wants to do this run. 

Then at the last moment, she remembered a very important Skype call she had to make at the same time as the run, so, oh, well...

4.  For the record, daughter has to be working by June 30th or she gets a one-way plane ticket back home.  Who will pick her up at the airport is her decision to make and plan.  Now, she's been all mopy about this, talking about how she'll have to go and live in a shelter and such.  I said, if you want to spend all your time looking for shelters, go ahead.  *I* would spend my time looking for friends to stay with. 

3.  The other reason I was late posting my blog is that I stupidly installed FireFox on my PC at home.  My PC at home is running on Windows XP.  I rarely use it except for uploading my Garmin data, and although I write and publish most of The Athena Diaries from my iPad, I "fine tune" it on the PC.

Firefox web Browser is like a husband that beats you.  You start thinking, now why did I stop seeing him?  And so you go back, and at first, everything is fine.  And then you start to realize: Oh yes, I deleted it because it SUCKS.  It uses enormous resources and freezes when I'm trying to write.  Then when I tried to download another browser - and don't tell me this is a coincidence - it freezes continuously, requiring computer restarts.  

I'm going to put a note on my computer at home reminding me not to ever, ever go back to Firefox again.

2.  Did I mention she also ate my wheat things without asking?  MY WHEAT THINS.  WITHOUT ASKING.

1.  I'm going to go do an ice cream run now.  Peace out.

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