Let Us Rock

It's Like A Grocery List of Ugly and Awesome

Things I Have Done Over The Past Two Weeks:

1.... 273

Really? You think I'm gonna list all that stuff? It's so boring and hardcore overachieving, it dulls the mind. Let me say this: the penultimate end of every school year makes PTO wenches like me dream in lists and agendas and budgets and not so much in angel wings and beautiful things and poetry.

Things I Am Doing In the Next Week:

I am packing up my three children and my husband for a five day vacation in the Great Capital of Florida's Over-55 Residences (where the growth of STDs is highest in the nation per-capita, FYI). (Which is all kinds of awesomely cool, if you think about it, despite the gonorrhea.) I will wash every one's summer clothes and buy them new swim suits if needed and then I will pack all of it into two bags for maximum easy travel. I will print the itinerary for the flights I booked and then, kiss them all as they leave.

As they leave.

Then? I will roll my own bag to the door. MY OWN BAG. Packed with my own bathing suits and my own beach dresses and my own Target sandals. Because the next day? I will greet the crack-ass of dawn to make a flight to a tiny car-less island on the Gulf of Mexico with a bunch of broads who will be equally childless and husbandless.

That's right. We're 40. We roll like this.

Things I Might Do After That:

I might write on my blog, I might not. I might be over-productive and shoot off PTO emails like a gunner, or maybe I'll back down and screw it all. I might take my kids for ice cream just because, and I might decide that no on gets ice cream EVER AGAIN for the same reason. I might call my dad, I might not. Who the fuck knows?

Do you?

I'm sick of making lists and adding it all up: what I've done, what I'll do (who I am?). I am sick of predicting my own future like it's possible, like I could plan for it. There is no App for that. No list for it. No way to prepare or get ready or get my game on for it.

It will come. I will be there.

If I pick up another pen to plan and make sense, stop me, ok?

Just stop me.

And meanwhile: go to Polite Fictions and be inspired... GO!

Analyze This Dream: No, Really -- I Mean It

I have incredibly lucid dreams, the kind that hang around in my waking life for hours and sometimes days. Once George Clooney took me to Prom. Another time, I saved hundreds of people from a sinking cruise ship. Two things are important about these dreams: 1) I have never been to a Prom, and 2) I have never been on cruise ship. I do however like a man in a tuxedo and being the ballsy heroine.

So I think we know what those dreams were about.

I don't always dream like this: certain medications can dull the scope of my dream life. For a while I took a drug to quit smoking. It didn't work and I never dreamt anything that I could remember. I'm still not sure which outcome was more devastating.

Lately, I have had two dreams that I shared with my friend, Mo. She's used to me saying all kinds of absurd stuff; plus, her husband is the dude who once read my astrological chart with intense expertise. I knew the company was suited for my weird dreams, which were briefly:

1) I see a little splinter on the GFYO's big toe and so I get my tweezers and go to work. Out comes a long single black hair. Followed by a tangled web of more black hair, and then more and more...

2) I had to catch food with my mouth only. I bobbed and weaved, like a party-trick doer.

So Mo's husband consults his library of awesome metaphysical books and sure enough, there are meanings to my nocturnal madness.

Toes = s balance

Hair = s thoughts and concerns

Mouth = s communication (and alt: you know what Freud thinks)

Food = s nourishment of all kinds: emotional, spiritual, social, etc.

I typed the info into my tiny phone so I would remember and I write it down here because I wonder: what does it all mean? Nothing, something, anything?

Go to it, geniuses. Figure me out.

They Left Me On the Side of the Road

I guess it could have been worse: I could have been ditched there without the beer I was holding. I mean, that one beer would have gotten me at least 50 yards down the perfectly manicured road, and I guess I could have started walking... But I was wearing a sun dress that barely covered my ass and a cowboy hat that I had only just purchased, in desperate sun-shading need, from Walgreens and I was carrying a beer at 2 in the afternoon. So mostly I hid behind a palm frond and waited for my sisters to come driving back -- in my father's Caddie laughing like they were the FUNNIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH.

It was the Second Annual Suburban Housewives Lost Weekend to my dad's house in South Carolina. The trip includes all the requisites of a journey like this: cocktails, shopping, poolside crossword doing, beachside people watching and me, the little sister, being mercilessly teased and ultimately left on the side of the road. In a stripper hat holding a cheap beer. On a street in a community that probably has a Neighborhood Watch for Tasteless Vacationing Broads.

It wasn't all like this. I got my shots in. When we ogled watched some beach volleyball at the local Tiki Bar, I laughed at one sister for clutching her purse so tightly I thought her hands might lose their blood supply and simply fall off. "This is the kind of place with thieves," she whispered, all shifty-eyed and wishing she had mace. And when another sister appeared with what can only be described as bedazzled resort wear slacks for an event at The Club, I couldn't contain my eye-ball rolling and too-cool-for-school grimace. (Meanwhile, I was wearing dirty white sneakers with a dress because my cheap leather sandals had dyed the soles of my feet orange.)

We tried on dresses and skirts and all kinds of bedazzled resort wear while packed in one tiny dressing room together, piles of clothes at our feet, elbows and credit cards and compliments ("no, really, that barely shows any back fat!") flying around at the same time. We floated around the pool and decided our children were all perfect and fine and everyone was going to be okay. We let each other sleep or cry or tell bad jokes and we three, and my dad and his wife, we laughed. A lot.

My father sat from his perch, literal and symbolic, and watched in bemused and somewhat horrified amazement. It's rare that we're together like this. And it's been such a long, long time since we lived in a house as a family: thirty years in fact. When I was ten, my middle sister moved away to boarding school and three years after that they were both gone to college. Granted, there were many times together after they shipped out -- a trip to Rome and Egypt when I was in middle school, long weekends in the summer when every part of my regular life shifted because they were home, weddings, funerals, and when they gathered us to tell our father was leaving.

But we only get the Annual Lost weekend, well, annually.

My father must be surprised that his oldest daughters still ditch his 40-year-old youngest at the side of the road and still find these pranks completely pee-in-the-pants hysterical. He must be surprised that we smoke and drink and swear and sometimes nearly pee in our pants with laughter in front of him without fear of grave punishment. He must wonder how it all came to this, thirty years after the family dinners happened every night and nearly 18 years since his first grand child was born. He must wonder how all that time and all that growing-up and all those dollars in fancy educations could result in a weekend like this. He watches his middle-aged daughters lounging by his pool in messes of their own making, committing their immature hi-jinks, and enjoying themselves with loud-mouth abandon.

I hope he is happy.

Because I was.