Half Baked, Twice as Good

Happy Wednesday which is actually my Friday because I’m off tomorrow through Monday so really it’s kind of like a Sunday night for vacation week! Hope you all have fun and fabulous and sunshiney plans for the 4th. I’ll be home…

…painting. Redecorating. Organizing. Spending money I don’t need to spend.

So – and I’ll post some pictures to really illustrate my point – our third bedroom, which we’ve been using as an office, has become a dumping ground for junk. Like, real live junk. Amongst other things, there are plastic bins full of photographs, baskets, old bank statements, Christmas ornaments and random paper. There are stacks of things to be recycled; DVDs that actually get watched on a regular basis and remote controls that don’t work or need batteries. There are shoes, an old rug, two suitcases and a computer monitor. I swear we’re not hoarders, though that’s what this is starting to sound like. We’re just two people with stuff we’re not sure what to do with that live in a house with three closets and virtually no attic space. Who can blame us?

To boot, this room is painted army green. No, seriously. Like, look at a tank, lighten up that green a notch or two, and that’s our room. It’s hideous and I can’t believe I ever agreed to paint it that color. It’s beyond awful. This green looks like moldy mud and it makes the room even more drab and miserable than it was to begin with.

Solution? Paint it darker! Bear with me here, because I know this sounds a little unconventional. We’ve decided to go with a dark navy blue for the walls (we already have off-white trim and molding) and a pale robin’s egg blue for the desk and maybe a side table. I want something rich and bold, but also something that will stand out behind the stacks and stacks of paper I’m accumulating from my business. (And before you complain, the paper is NECESSARY. This is a stationery business. It’s mostly envelopes and miscellaneous sizes of stationery.)

The plan is to get steel shelves from the home improvement store for either side of the window. I think the chrome color will look good against the blue and will give it kind of a modern edge that the rest of the house really doesn’t have. The baskets and bins will go up on the shelves – which means off the floor! – and I will become at least somewhat more organized.

All of this is just a picture in my mind; I haven’t drawn anything out or done anything except get paint chips. BB isn’t so much on board with painting it ourselves because he finds painting to be mundane and peasant and he’d rather spend his day off watching All in the Family. He’s such a party pooper.

So here’s to the 4th of July: the perfect time to work on house projects, grill something delicious, and watch Real Housewives reruns. Hope yours is just as fun.

It’s Monday morning people, you all know that, and so I’m giving you BRAND NEW CONTENT to blow your minds! Actually, I’m just writing for a change, and so, you’re welcome. Below I give to you a list of apps for your iPhone or iTouch that I have found to be, quite frankly, revolutionary. Behold, readers: a list.

1. FMC: Female Menstrual Calendar. Oh yes, I started with that. I AM THAT BOLD. Anyway, this nifty little app records your periods, sex and stats so that you know if a) you’re on a regular schedule (which I’m not ever, so I need this and that’s why I got it to begin with), b) when your ovulation dates are (this is helpful whether or not you want to be pregnant – either lay off HA! or get.it.on. according to this calendar), and c) it shows you statistics about your periods that you may or may not need to know, but which are interesting. So you download the app, put in your information and voila! Your entire reproductive system RIGHT THERE in a shiny colorful app. Will wonders never cease.

2. Air hockey. Now I know that there are about a million and one games to choose from and from that, probably 82,000 are some sort of hockey games but Y’ALL. This is air hockey like from the ’84 arcade. Like from Chuck E. Cheese. And if you turn up the volume kind of loud, you get the sound of the AIR! and the sound of the back and forth pong-pong-pong as the puck bounces off you and your opponent. I have played this for hours, to BB’s chagrin, and sometimes I have to turn off the pong-pong sound because it gets me caught. Otherwise he thinks I’m emailing very important people. And sometimes I like to let him think that. This game is not so much revolutionary as it is just plain fun, and I guess fun could be revolutionary for some people. You sad sacks.

3. Speaking of sad sacks, when you’re down, you’re troubled and need a helping hand from someone who isn’t James Taylor, simply go onto Pizza Hut’s app, enter your information and POW! You have the entire Hut kitchen at your disposal. Choose from exciting pictures of delicious pizza toppings to create your perfect sack of sad cholesterol. And if you’re lazy, you can just have it delivered, or you can get excited about the fact that you just ordered pizza from your handheld device and you can roll up to the drive-thru and be all, Yeah homie. That’s me. I ordered FROM MY iPHONE. How you like me now? And then of course all the Pizza Hut employees will laugh at you as you drive off but really? What’s a little humiliation in the face of a piping hot Pizza Hut pizza? Can’t put a price on that, my friends.

4. Zillow Real Estate. Now I’m not assuming that you all don’t already have these apps downloaded, and perhaps you’re at home right now, scrolling through them as you have one eye over here. But for y’all that don’t know, allow me to indulge my inner know-it-all. Zillow is this awesome app that finds your location, lets you zoom in on your neighborhood (or anyone else’s for that matter) and gives you information like selling price, asking price, house/property information AND it alerts you if you want it to when prices on houses you covet go up or down. It’s also fun to use when you head out to dinner at someone’s house, find it to be utterly fabulous, and want to know how much they paid for it (if they’ve bought it recently). If nothing else, it’s a fun way to waste time.

5. Mint. I wrote a paper about Mint last summer for an executive marketing class I was taking (because, you know, I like to execute marketing and all) but I’d been using Mint since it first rolled out a few years ago. If you don’t use Mint in your normal life, you are seriously missing out. Mint is an awesome financial planning site that uses your usernames and passwords to access your dozens of accounts from wherever to whowhat’sit and shows you all the ways you’re spending money you don’t have. Or saving it, whatever. And then it draws up little pie charts and line graphs and alerts you when your balances are low, or when a payment is due. Y’all it ROCKS. Hard. Some people are skeptical at first because of the whole here’s-my-name-and-password thing, but actually it’s super secure. It doesn’t store any of that information; it just goes out into the wild blue yonder, sucks down your sad sack bank balance and reminds you that you should’ve paid your American Express two weeks ago.

I could go on and on about this for days, because I have many more than this and use them every single solitary day. But these are the ones that honestly kind of mostly have changed my life, you know, in the way that an Apple application can change your life.

How was your weekend?

…THESE! Hello Rewind is a genius company dedicated to helping survivors of sex-trafficking get jobs and start a new life. All you do is send in your old, beloved t-shirt, and Hello Rewind will turn around and make it into a laptop sleeve.

See? EVERYONE WINS.

Holy crap, it’s Tuesday. Somehow I turned around realized that I hadn’t posted in a week, and that’s why I couldn’t get my head on straight in the mornings. TOTALLY MAKES SENSE NOW.

So how are y’all? I, for one, am still under the influence of last night’s Ambien, which means that I am super sleepy and not at all alert and aware. Please do not sneak up behind me today; most likely I will be all Whaaa? and it will ruin the surprise and not be fun at all for you. Sorry.

It’s been kind of a busy week since last we spoke. Molly and Jason from the Bachvomit got married on TV last night, the tail end of which I was able to catch after I got home from business class. THAT’S RIGHT, I’m taking a BUSINESS CLASS, bitches. Check your jealousies at the door. (More on that in a minute.) Last week we were getting the kiddies all ready for their spring break, the one where they get to go home and do whatever it is that they do there, and the one where I HAVE TO BE HERE. AT SCHOOL. IN MY OFFICE. I’m totally not bitter, y’all.

In other news, our fun friends Butt Pirate and Rump Ranger came over for dinner Saturday night. There were lots of laughs but I’d say there wasn’t nearly enough name-calling, so I call a do-over RIGHT NOW. As a hostess gift, Pirate and Ranger brought us a rain gauge. It is 8 kinds of awesome. Yes, you should be jealous. (Except I think I told you to check your jealousies at the door, so…we’ll work on that.)

Do you see? DO YOU SEE? This is what the Ambien does to me in the mornings. I cannot be held responsible for my written actions. (Did I just steal that from a Kennedy kid? It sounds familiar…) Anyway, so then we finally went and bought a dryer on Sunday, which is just in time because this morning I went to get my jeans and they stunk like mildew in the cold dryer, which is when I realized that the stuff in there was STILL DAMP and it pissed me off and made me almost cry when I had to wear some other pants. The new dryer comes tomorrow night, and it’s not really the dryer that dreams are made of, but it’s fine. We searched four hours for that damn thing, and by the end we were all Yo, pack that shit up. Even if it’s a Maytag.

So back to my new bidness! I’m so excited about it, and you should be too because it might mean that I have extra dollars to do stuff with. Except that last night my friends and I went to this class on how to write a business plan, and apparently people who start their own businesses start out with like no money and wind up with even less money until 10 years later when they collect an annual salary of like $50. THESE ARE MY ASPIRATIONS.

It’s going to be a stationery and invitation printing business, where you’d come to my house, tell me what you need said invitation for (your divorce is final, your 40th birthday has come around again for the 7th time, your kid managed to make it another year without breaking a limb, or whatever) and we sit down together to design it and make it happen. Or you can be boring and flip through some books and order crap out of there, too. Except it’s TOTALLY not crap. It’s fine, expensive but affordable paper that you and everyone who sees it will love. My goal is to build a base of satisfied and loyal customers who will return holiday after miserable holiday to buy their paper goods from me because I am skilled, personable, and offer competitive prices.

Or at least that’s what I’m telling people.

I have decided right this second that I’m going to have a contest! With a PRIZE! Like a real.live.giveaway y’all. I need a name for this business that is going to rocket into the universe at lightening speed and return to earth with buckets of cash. I’m not sure that “Buckets O’ Cash” is quite catchy enough for an elegant invitation business, do you? Well, maybe you do.

Anyway, cough up your ideas in the comments section, and the one I like best (but am not contractually required to use) gets a gift card, probably to iTunes. Woot woot, ’cause who can’t use an iTunes gift card, yo?

So get to it: put on your thinking caps, get creative and do my work FOR me already. Sheesh. And also do it for the iTunes card. You know you want it…*said in sexy come-hither voice that is NOT AT ALL creepy.*

I don’t think I’ve talked about my therapy lately, well, because normally I don’t recount every session here for you to read and judge. *Smiles!* But I will share last week’s with you because it got to me like this big long shovel, reaching down into my gut and digging out the old moldy stuff that makes me have allergies and not breathe sometimes.

We talked about my childhood – the beloved golden compass of therapy, the holy grail, the manna from heaven, and my girl got what she wanted: tears, lots and lots of tears. I’ve said before that I didn’t realize how angry I was at some things, and at first, I didn’t know at what or whom I was angry. But then I wrote a letter (and six more in my head) and then my counselor asked the right questions and then suddenly I was crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, and I was remembering things I haven’t thought of since I was 8 and HOLY CRAP THIS WOMAN IS WORTH THE MONEY.

I really wish she read this, because she gets so many free compliments, it’s ridiculous.

I was so exhausted after that encounter that I went home and tried desperately to do more than wander around like a limp noodle, but I failed. She gave me some online surveys to take which basically measure your relationship to yourself and how you view your strengths and weaknesses. Turns out that I’m not my biggest fan, and also that my strengths are that I don’t actually kill people even when I want to. Go me!

So I guess from here on out one of our goals is to teach me to “love myself” or some other sparkly rainbow bullshit and that I should try to unlearn the learned behavior of self-deprecation and self-loathing. (I kind of just made that up.) I’ve decided to give myself some gifts.

#1: I finally used my Sephora gift card from Christmas and loaded myself up on products that no one in this life really needs (i.e. Kim Kardashian’s perfume. Don’t hate me, but it’s kind of awesome.) I wrote myself this note on the gift card in the package that said something like “yay for facing your fears” and then I put little x’s and o’s on it so I would feel like I’m making out with myself.

#2: I was really conscious over the weekend about staying on track and taking my medication (aka “DRUGS!”) as prescribed so that I didn’t have to play whack-a-mole with the anxiety that would try to pop up now and then. Again, go me.

#3: I got proactive and made BB call a painter to give us estimates on some much-needed house projects. This is a gift to me because then people in our neighborhood won’t talk about us and give our house dirty looks and send our house to a therapist for self-esteem issues, which in turn makes me feel better. Whew.

#4: I actively re-routed some thoughts in my head after one person close to me said a thoughtless, hurtful thing. Instead of waiting until I went to sleep to pound her head in, I instead snatched the thought in my head, jerked it to the left and sent it down another path. Kind of it worked.

My panic and anxiety, y’all, are just leaps and bounds and over-the-rainbow and up in space and are light years away and better than last summer and fall. I can’t even begin to tell you what a difference I feel in myself. I go back and look at my posts from those months, and I recognize that girl but I don’t feel a wave of panic when I read what she wrote. Sure I’m still insecure, and sure it’s possible that I’m a closeted introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body, and yes, it could happen that an airplane ride or a conference room or a crowded wedding could give me a little shiver. Anything can happen.

What I have gifted to myself though is the greatest gift of all: recognizing that I have a problem, accepting that I can’t fix it myself, and seeking help for it at all costs. I know y’all raised your eyebrows on Monday when every answer on my list of questions was Drugs! Drugs! More drugs! Gimme drugs! and I understand. Plenty of people I know, family members included, can’t stand to take a pill for anything – let’s walk it off, drink it down, whatever, and forget about it. For me though, these drugs are my lifeline. They are as important to me as the air I breathe and the 8 glasses of water a day I don’t drink. I’ll tell you what they are later, but for now you should know that if I am able to function even 40% better than before, I have won an Olympic gold medal.

(And actually, I’d put myself at 65%, truth be told. BECAUSE I ROCK.)