Category Archives: Totally normal

Deadline

Posted by Elizabeth in Anxiety, Daily, Muse, Totally normal

I need to focus.

I need to find calm and clarity.

I need to stop being a people-pleaser.

I need to learn to say no.

I need to find faith in myself.

I need to find strength in my knowledge.

I need to become and remain devoted to what I know is real.

I need to return to writing what moves me.

I need to adjust my attention.

I need to rely on others, if just for a time.

I need to ask for support and allow myself to breathe.

I need to realize that considering myself isn’t selfish.

I am presenting four years worth of graduate degree work on April 25th at 3:00 in the afternoon. I have not finished; I am not ready. I am terrified and excited to show off what I’ve done, except I can’t really remember what I’ve done because I took the last year off. I am exhausted and not sleeping, though I suspect school is only part of it. I feel pulled in two million directions, though I also suspect that is of my own doing.

My therapist used to tell me that I was my own worst critic. Which is absolutely true, because I am constantly thinking in my mind that someone is looking at me funny or strange, or that they are judging me silently. And while this may be the case, why do I give a flying fuck? Why can’t I teach myself to have confidence in my knowledge, or my work, or myself?

I am smart, dammitall. I know what I’m talking about. I can somehow, some way, pull together enough information and knowledge from my own brain to prove to other people that I DO DESERVE THAT DEGREE. Can’t I?

Why oh why must I constantly question myself? Right now as I type this I’m worried that you all (the ones of you that are left, that is) are thinking to yourselves that every sentence in this post begins with “I.” And then I’m thinking, Well, who really cares? Because this is my personal blog and that means I’ve given myself permission to say whatever the fuckity fuck fuck I want to say. But that’s not really the case, is it? I still look around all day and wonder who thinks my hair is greasy, or who is judging the length of my pants, or whether my cankles are particularly stand-outy today.

It’s been quite some time since I meditated, though it hasn’t been that long since I tried. I couldn’t focus this past time; my mind wandered and I couldn’t drown out the sounds in my house. Asking someone – someone who is AROUND ALL THE TIME GOD HELP ME – to keep it down is like asking an elephant to look a little shorter in a picture.

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this except to say that I need some focus and attention to detail. I need some advice, Internet. What do you do when you need to completely drown out all the noise of the world so you can figure out what the hell you’re actually doing?

I need to know this.

I need to find some peace within myself.

I need to graduate.

Papa’s got a brand new bag

Posted by Elizabeth in Addiction to, Anxiety, Beach, Family, Good Stuff, Listing, Muse, Rejoicing, Totally normal

I’ve been avoiding the blog for a little while because there’s been so much going on I haven’t known where to start. Maybe I’ll start by making a list, as I do love a list better than just about anything.

1.       Brian got laid off.

2.       Brian was home for a really, really long time.

3.       I was the world’s greatest cheerleader, resume-writer and job coach. For free.

4.       I was the world’s greatest church-goer, two whole weeks in a row.

5.       Brian got hired!

6.       Brian’s first day at work was yesterday!

So week before last Brian was running around dropping his resume off anywhere that had an open door, and he decided to take one by his pre-Pepsi company just for the hell of it. Before he could get halfway home, the vice-president called him in for an interview! Can you believe it! Neither can I! Neither can he!

Last Wednesday he interviewed for a similar position as to what he did for Pepsi and they hired him ON THE SPOT. On the spot! For a job! And the sweetest deal of all is that this job is Monday through Friday. Not once in the 7 years we’ve been married has he had the same schedule as I have. We’ve been ships passing through the night, running into each other in the kitchen and occasionally one of us sees the other by sifting through laundry, searching for familiar clothes.

The last few weeks have been the best of our married lives. It’s no secret to our friends that we’ve gone through a bit of a…rough patch over the past few months. In fact, it was super rough. Like, SANDPAPER rough. And yet – YET! – he loses his job and we become blissfully happy. It’s like all the negativity of the world, all the things that beat us down over and over and over had magically disappeared. Brian’s face softened and he slept better. We laughed at stuff and marveled because we forgot what laughing sounds like.

And so this past weekend I surprised him with an overnight trip to the beach. It was amazing timing because North Carolina had its first 70-degree weather of the year and we honest-to-goodness took our beach chairs out on the sand. We snuggled in with books and short-sleeved shirts, and we walked for a little while with our toes in the water. (Which was frigid. We are obviously stupid.) We had a nice peaceful dinner, walked on the beach at night under a weird orangey moon and we slept in. We took naps and we laughed some more, because it kind of sounded good.

Now I realize all of this might come off as a little, I don’t know, cheesy maybe. And that’s true. But I’ve found myself in a new quandary, Internet, and here’s where I need your help.

For the last few years, Brian has been the primary housekeeper because he was home ALL THE TIME. He had like, a gajillion days off and so the cleaning fell on him. Now that we’re back on the same schedule, we have to rework our chore chart a little. I want there to be less clutter, obviously, but for right now I just feel like we need to spring clean for a fresh start.

I’m doing one room at the time, starting tonight with our bathroom. I’ll tackle the other stuff later. What are your best cleaning tips? What makes the whole job easier for you? I might just sweeten the comment pot with a little prize for the one cleaning tip that saves my life. YOU NEVER KNOW.

The more you know…

Posted by Elizabeth in Listing, Lucille & Charles, Muse, Random Shit, Totally normal

NBC

Like an afterschool special, I am here FOR YOU. A community service, if you will. A fount of good information to help you be your best you.  So today, I ask the question:

Did you know?

1.       That the reason aluminum is the main ingredient in deodorant is because that’s what keeps you from stinking? And that “all-natural, aluminum-free” deodorant is code for makes-you-stink?

2.       That giant glue traps designed to catch roaches can stick to a cat’s hind end?

3.       That a combination of scissors, Palmolive and Wesson oil can’t get that kind of glue off?

4.       That my vet will bathe a cat for only $20?

5.       That Facebook might be just the thing to get a man out of his dark, jobless depression?

6.       That while the rest of the country is buried in ice and snow, North Carolina has 70 degree weather with howling winds and eerie pink skies?

7.       That Doritos, Gatorade, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Quaker and everything in your pantry is a PepsiCo product?

8.       That trying to ban PepsiCo products is next to impossible?

9.       That Coke Zero is the best-tasting thing since Coke?

10.   That my world is upside down?

Mother Tongue

Posted by Elizabeth in Addiction to, Daily, Good Stuff, Muse, Random Shit, The Almighty TV, The Weather, Totally normal, WTF?

I forgot to put up my post about the Golden Globes. Well, that implies that I wrote a post about the Golden Globes and that’s a blatant lie, so there you go. I’ve had far more important things to do. First of all, I worked like, almost a full week last week, y’all. I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I was so done with my work people by Friday that I looked at my boss at one point and said, “Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Just shut up.” Oh yeah. True story.

Anyway, this weekend I was all I’m gonna organize! I’m gonna get shit done! I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna! and now it’s Sunday night and I haven’t even finished that one load of laundry. HOWEVER. I’ve yet to find a person out there who hasn’t read Stieg Larsson’s Millienium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) and I’ve been anxious to watch the movie. A quick search of the on-demand movie channel revealed that the first two books are now movies in Swedish with English subtitles. Let this not deter you, Internet! These movies are OUTSTANDING.

If you’ve read them, you know how graphic they are and the movies do the nasty parts some serious justice. They are entertaining and stick with the story pretty closely, but by far the most fun for me was learning Swedish words. For instance, did you know that “okay” in English and “okay” in Swedish are the same? ME EITHER. And “holy shit” and “what the fuck” sound exactly the same, except with extra syllables. I always thought Spanish was fun, but Swedish? Well. I haven’t asked anyone about this officially, but I’m pretty sure Swedish is a combo of German, French and English, and maybe some other languages, and they use all those fun letters with the dots and slashes through them, like the No Smoking signs. SO FUN, RIGHT?!

Now this is interesting: I just looked on Wikipedia and it turns out that Swedish is the official language of Finland, too. Which totally confuses me, because I would think that Finnish would be Finland’s language, but does that mean that Finnish isn’t a language? Or do people in Finland not like their own language? Or is it like Canada, where people speak English but probably don’t want to, and feel like Americans just shoved English down their throats and so they rebel by saying “oot the door” and other weird stuff?

These are the questions that keep me up…in the afternoon. I didn’t even nap today thinking about this stuff. I blame Stieg Larsson.

In other news, everyone in these movies drives a Volvo. Or, if they’re executives at their jobs, they drive Audis or Mercedes. Can you imagine living somewhere where there isn’t a tacky 12 year-old domestic death trap parked on every street corner? Me either. And all the houses in Stockholm looked really quaint but modern and Ikea-y and the rural towns have names like Uppsala and Hedestad. I said on Facebook today that I wanted to plan a trip to Sweden soon and one of my friends sent me the current weather in Stockholm, which was 22 degrees, and I said that I didn’t mind because hello? It’s colder than that in Pittsburgh today. (I only know that because I’m watching the Steelers play the Jets, and that’s only because my friend Kristen showed me Heinz Field when I was there a few months ago and now I feel beholden to Pennsylvania.)

Tomorrow I’m going to see the lu-lu doctor, which is not the vagina doctor. Apparently this is confusing to some people. I’m going to ask her what I’m supposed to do about taking my crazy meds when I’m sick with a stomach virus, and also about Ambien amnesia, which is happening more and more. Maybe I’ll come out of there with some new prescriptions, and if that’s the case, I’ll be sure to let you know what’s good and new on the crazytrain market.

Until then…

Var är toaletten? (I’m asking you where the toilet is, please, when I’m in Sweden. Or Finland.)

The one where January bites back

Posted by Elizabeth in Addiction to, Anxiety, Daily, Lamenting, Muse, Random Shit, The Almighty TV, Totally normal, WTF?

If writing is an exercise, I’m about as lazy and out of shape as one can be. I’ve been practicing a little with logging my dreams (see recent posts) but writing about my life is, well, a bit overwhelming. Many of you reading have blogs yourselves, and most of you have regular schedules of posting. There are Monday these and Wednesday those, and sections and lists that your readers count on. I used to do that here, and then life got in the way.

I vow to try really hard to remember to use my muscles a little more often.

Since Christmas, the house has been quiet but tumultuous, if that’s possible. I had a three week break from school over the holidays, which I really enjoyed but which threw my circadian rhythm off so much so that I worried for days about oversleeping on my first day back. The first week back was a blur of training, registration, lesson planning, putting out fires and getting back into a regular sleep schedule. The second week back was about as awful as I would expect in January. We discovered mistakes we’d made with advising this past semester and had to rectify those quickly, until it snowed and I got the stomach flu and we had extended drop/add and my co-workers were short staffed and OH GOD THE STOMACH FLU.

From what I know, it’s spread like wildfire around this town. From what I’ve heard, it’s all over everywhere. I think I’d rather be shot in the toes than have that again. Not even kidding.

So I guess the point of my story is that my mind has been elsewhere and I’ve suffered because of it. There are so many things that I think Oh! I need to remember to blog about that! and then a day goes by and I forget, or it’s not relevant anymore. I watched some serious TV over both the holiday and The Illness of January, and I’m happy to report that “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is my new discovery. It’s just…genius. I can’t believe I hadn’t found it before, but I owe that show a debt of gratitude for helping me climb out of a panic attack the other day. The thing about a stomach bug is that if I can’t keep anything inside me (I know this is gross, but most of y’all are moms and your gross-o-meter should be tolerating higher stuff than this) I can’t keep my medication regulated. So it stands to reason that without the good drugs, I am a pure-T nutcase. I’m telling you, this week was not pretty.

Catching up on Google Reader was a treat this week, as I’m woefully behind on my reading and have so much more to go. A lot of your posts have given me good ideas and some have even helped me come up with things to talk about in my class this semester. Y’all are so smart. I feel so…inferior.

In other news, things that have been rocky are slowly rocking themselves back right again. I wish so much that I could talk about this here, but the important thing is that you know I am and will always be a shiny, sparkling, extra wonderful, fantastical rock star. I just don’t see how you could argue otherwise. I didn’t make new year’s resolutions because frankly, who keeps them? (not me), and most of them cost money (gym, diet crap, buy a fancy planner, buy organization shit that will sit in a bag for a year) so I just scrapped that plan. Instead I am resolving NOTHING. I promise you absolutely nothing, I don’t guarantee a single thought, idea or gesture, and I surely am not planning to live up to anyone’s expectations.

See what I did here? I lowered your opinion of me so when I do good shit, you’ll be all surprised and impressed. I said it already: I’m a genius.

Finally, this exercise of the writing here has sparked some ideas so I’ll be back in the next few days to write specifically and, perhaps, intelligently. I ask that you stick with me, and I ask that you do this one huge thing for me that would make me happier than all the Doritos on the planet: send your love, your happy thoughts, your prayers for good and your healing powers to my friend. She is an even brighter and shinier star than I, and she needs a few peanuts in her gallery.

Thanks bunches.