RP:  It was really hard for me to get over you.  Maybe I haven’t completely let the idea of what our future could be go yet.  But our present is not working for me.  You know me too well to treat me like you did.  You are far too old to be playing these games.  I’m too old for games.  As angry as I am about the last seven months I still can’t get you out of my head.  I can still feel the jump my stomach did the first time you really looked me in the eyes.  That day I saw in your eyes exactly what is so deep inside of me.  Where did that boy go?

Reggie:  I’m not exactly sure how we ended up here.  Have we not been down this exact road before?  We’ve passed this mile marker, I know that.  Why are we back here?  Is there more to us, or is this just convenience?  To be honest I don’t know the answer to that myself.  I feel like there could be more, but I also know that we don’t have the guts to explore.  We can’t be honest with ourselves, which is amusing to me because my favorite thing about you is how at ease I feel when I’m with you.  I put up with everything, I ignore what bothers me, because of how relaxed you make me, and your ability to make me laugh.  But if what you did bothers me on another level maybe I can’t have anything with you.

X:  Oh, I get it.  You got a wife and a child and the future we had planned.  The day we both ended it my future dissolved before my eyes.  It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to come to grips with, the complete loss of my path in life.  And here I am again.  You get a wife and a baby and I get a stroke and infertility.  The new future I imagined for myself is now vanishing.  Is this why you’ve made an appearance in my dreams?  I don’t care how many times you ask, I’m NEVER going back there again.  Living through my life crashing down made me the person I am today.  A person that I am proud of, most of the time.  It made me a stronger person.  As soon as I come around to remembering all that then I can believe that I will get through this.

U:  Do you exist?  Is there anyone strong enough, determined enough, to put up with me?  Some where under the crazy and the health problems there is a person that I’m struggling to get back to.  What’s the point if there’s no one who can deal with me at my worst?  If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best.  And some day?  My best is going to win this struggle.  I believe in that about as much as I believe in you.

Seriously.

Originally uploaded by Erin!

Some day I’m going to have this printed and hung in my office.

I’ve been saying that exact thing to myself for months now.

I’ve started something of a spring cleaning fit.  I’m not sure if it would technically be defined as “spring cleaning,” since it has been initiated by having two consecutive days of not feeling like I’m dying after spending most days since mid-December couch ridden.  It’s probably more of a “holy fuck my life is in tatters because I haven’t been able to move, time to put some of this shit back in order.”  Either way, stuff has been accomplished this week.  Including two trips to bars to hang out with friends.  OMFG!  Who knew that would ever feel so novel?

In my quest to shove everything back in it’s nook I’ve come across a few things that have no home.  So I’m sticking them here.  Because I can.

So, here I present, Random Things I Have Saved in the Outbox of My Cell Phone:

- Always blessings, never losses.

- Some guy just called Gwen’s wee hoo woo hoo song infectious.  Yeah, just like an STD.

- The way of the fool is right in his own eyes.

 Well now that those are out of the way I can focus on figuring out why my 401k was closed, this nasty stack of medical bills, the many letters I need to write, or Swamp’s broken cage.  And the fact that I still can’t see my desk and I’ve been in here for an hour trying to remedy that.

Perhaps it’s just nap time…

I posted that last thing on December 16 in a fit of rage and having a strange head pain that was making my eye blurry.  I mentioned stroke because I’m prone to hyperbole when I’m in a craptastic mood.

On December 17 I had a stroke.  That strange head pain turned into the worst pain of my life and lasted almost a week.  Pain that morphine didn’t touch. 

I didn’t find out until January 31 that I had a blood clot that had caused a stroke.  I was under house arrest for weeks waiting for doctors to figure out what was wrong with me.  Weeks trapped alone on my couch unable to read, barely able to take a shower.

I’m getting better now.  We have a lot of catching up to do.

It’s two in the morning now.  My whole household is still awake.  Except that damn hamster who must have tired himself out running on his wheel all damn day.  (Hello, welcome to jenallday.com which is apparently now a hamster blog.)  It is crazy town over here.  We sleep all day and then at 1 a.m. it’s time to get down to business.

Except for me.  My two projects scheduled for today lay scattered all over my house.   My house that only a week ago was spotlessly clean.  My house that in a week will need to be spotlessly clean.  I can’t remember what I’ve been doing for the last four hours.  I’ve been in a complete daze.  I lost the battle today.  Everything that is not in my nature to ignore has slapped me in the face.  And then there were the surprises that I shouldn’t care about but I do.  Because I’m STUPID.

I can’t talk to my best friend who calms me down because of choices we’re both making.  The other spends all our conversations begging me to stop taking my medication.  He wins tonight, because I’m skipping the nightly dose.  I’ve lost the battle with today, what’s the point of trying to keep it together?  I already have a squinty eye from the stroke that is threatening to break lose and my stress rash has taken up residence all over my neck again.

For today, I give up.

Text Sent:  I’m the hobo in the south corner of the restaurant filling up on chips.

Hysterical Call Received:  You can’t tell me directions.  I DON’T KNOW DIRECTIONS!

 ********

Swamp Ass is still feverishly in love with his wheel.  I’ve learned my lesson, never take his wheel away because the next week will be spent wondering what the hell that noise is.

My Mom this morning:  “I woke up at 2 a.m. wondering who the hell was sharpening pencils?”

The back story:  A few weeks ago I was sorta ambushed into adopting a drawf hamster.  In the same week that I adopted two more beta fish.  Pictures and stories on their names were to be posted but then Ol’ Dirty Bastard threw himself out of his fish tank to his own death on the carpet below.  That ended the bliss that was my newly doubled pet total.  (And caused my neighbors much confusion I’m sure when all I could be heard yelling was “Ol’ Dirty Bastard committed suicide!!  Holy crap.  Suicide!”)

So, I’ve got this hamster.  And he’s kind of a jerk.  I’ve never had a rodent as a pet before.  (Note:  My brother had a hamster when we were little and our parents forced us to watch it give birth.  SCARRED FOR LIFE.  Learning experience my ass.)  So me and this hamster are in our getting to know you phase.  So far he knows that I’m apparently only capable of giving completely inappropriate names to pets, and I know that Swamp Ass sleeps all day and runs on that damn wheel as soon as it’s lights out. 

So when my bed was occupied with Shannon this weekend after my birthday get together and Swamp decided to pull his favorite party trick and scare the crap out of her by running on his wheel at 2 a.m. I took his wheel away.  GASP!  Yes, I am a mean pet mother. 

And then I didn’t put his wheel back on Sunday.  Because I was sleepy.  And then also Monday, because I was sleepy.  And then Tuesday rolls around and I walk into the bedroom to find Swamp Ass dangling from his front paws from the roof of his cage trying to get at his beloved wheel.  Well then I kind of felt like an asshole.  So I attempted to get his wheel back in the cage but all that little menace wanted to do was escape from the cage.  I just don’t do rodents running wild in my house so I threw him back in, closed the door and put the wheel back on top of the cage.

This morning I find him sitting on his ledge looking as pissed as a hamster can muster.  The wheel?  No where to be found.  How a hamster knocked a large chunk of plastic off the roof of his cage and halfway under my bed four feet away I’ll never know, but I figured it was time to give him the wheel back.  He’s been running on that damn thing ever since.

Jen:  “Mom, that hamster hasn’t shut the fuck up since I gave him that wheel back.”

Mom:  “He probably was missing his exercise.  OH!  Maybe I should get a wheel!”

Jen:  “…  …  … Um, we had a wheel, it was called a treadmill.  We sold it because we never used it.”

Mom:  “Oh, that’s right.  Never mind.”

I’m taking the next month off from this website.  How is that any different from the last months of ignoring this website you ask?  This month I’m not going to feel guilty about it.  I just can’t write right now and that’s finally okay with me.

For me there’s a delicate balance between being too crazy and too happy to write.  I’ve not mastered that balance lately and when you add in a splash of barely having time to sleep you end up with this place.  I’m taking a month off to figure out what the hell I’m doing here*. 

However, in the spirit of fairness after a month off I’m going to do a month of full throttle.  I’ll be killing myself over NaBloPoMo again.  Thirty straight days of posting… it doesn’t even seem like a good idea right now, I can’t imagine how ugly it’s going to get.  And that’s the point.

Maybe at the end of the next two months I’ll be able to decide whether to kill this site or not.  Leave it to me to find a bipolar approach to dealing with this elephant on my desktop.

*Here meaning more of what I’m doing on this planet.  All I ever do here is babble.  Relax, I’m not having an existential blog crisis.  I’m not that crazy.

Maybe it’s the weather.

I definitely think it could be the pills.  I’m so sick of the pills.

I realized almost a month in advance that the hardest day of the year is coming.  I don’t even remember how I handled it last year, how can it be this hard this year?  How can it still be this hard seven years later?

I miss my brothers.  I need my neighbor parents around more.  My heart breaks that I don’t get to watch two of my nephews grow up.

I can’t even explain this one:  I feel trapped in this state.

If I ignore the emails can I pretend that he’s still a few miles up the road and not on his way to another continent?

This budget of mine is definitely a thorn in the side.

My calendar… damn my calendar is just boxes filled with anxiety.  Why can’t I say no?  When I do say no why can’t I spend the time on myself instead of collapsing into a ball of immobility on my couch?

Migraine out of left field, that has definitely thrown a wrench in the works.  Add “blacking out” twice in front of near strangers, not a good thing.  Am I falling apart again?

I have the most ridiculous case of writers block ever.  How can you even get writers block when all you write about are your thoughts? 

And then the answer hits me:  I’m hiding.  How many times in one day do I have to start crying simply because I sat still long enough to actually hear the thoughts in my head?  I can list all day and it doesn’t stop the fact that I am stuffing things so far down that all I can feel is that nagging unbalanced whine of something not being quite right.  It’s not writers block when you have fifteen post it notes scribbled hastily because your voice was screaming too loudly to ignore.  It’s HIDING when those post its lay in a pile on the desk for weeks because actually running with them would mean thinking.  Thinking would mean I’d have to admit that I’m sad that I’m not where I want to be, that my family isn’t all here, that my friends are moving apart.  It would mean acknowledging that I am losing my shit and I have no idea how to stop it because I’ve let it build and build until it’s so much bigger then even I know.

I used to be much better at repressing.  I’m losing my edge.

These are a few of the Post Its I found while cleaning off my desk today.  I do this, scribble furiously when a snippet comes to me, tuck it way to be expounded on later.  I’m not in the mood to expound and to be honest the stories behind each are probably better left untold.  The theme in the pile I gathered today appears to be boys.  These are three very different boys, and I have to love them for very different reasons.

• He told me this was a night I would never forget.  I knew he was right.  Sometimes you have these moments, even as you’re living them you know they’ll never fade.  Years later and I still know there was a twin bed, The Dreaming Tree, and an earthquake we didn’t feel because we were too busy falling in love.

• How I Know That You Love Me:  When I crawl back onto the couch we’ve been forced to share I’m shivering.  You know I’m always cold.   Without a word you pull the extra blanket off the back of the couch tightly around me.  You settle in next to me to wait for morning and mash your warm feet on top of my ice cold ones. 

• When the phone rings I think I know exactly what he’s going to say.  Boys are forever surprising me.  Why is he apologizing?  He’s right, things did get a bit inappropriate, but I’m not bothered by it.  Isn’t that his point?  He accepts that he doesn’t need to apologize for my sake and still offers to be “better” next time.  We both laugh trying to picture what “better” is going to look like from him.