ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CARRY THAT?

Okay, this blog is about to become all about my nocturnal activities. I tell you something... that would be much more exciting reading if I had a boyfriend!

Well, it is what it is.

Last night at approximately 9pm I was actually feeling tired. My first thought was to put a movie in the DVD player and then be ready for bed at my usual time ~ 11pm. My second thought was: why wait? If I am feeling sleepy now, why not just go on to bed? You might actually get a decent night of sleep.

Isn't that hilarious?

At 11pm, I was wishing I had watched the movie. At midnight, I listened to my meditational CD again. When it clicked off and I was still wide awake, it is a reasonable assumption that I was ticked. I was also thinking about Purple Cow's onions in the bowl suggestion from a previous blog, but didn't feel like cutting onions in the middle of the night. Plus, I couldn't remember the rest of the instructions. Grrrrr.

Plus I was hot. I really like to sleep in cooler temps than my parents. Plus, I always have the misfortune to end up in the hottest room in the house. How does this happen? It was that way in FL, and it happened again here. What up with that?

So, I opened my door (not so keen on that) and waved the cooler air in and went back to bed. I turned on the TV, cut the volume down to "2," and noticed that my TV was still on Soapnet. Clearly, I hadn't watched anything since Friday. I watch General Hospital at 10pm on Soapnet during the week. It is my winding down time before bed. If One Life To Live is particularly good, I wind down one hour earlier. The thing is that All My Children comes on at 8pm weekdays. It hasn't been good enough in a long time for me to wind down that early. I have my book and my blog, so All My Children just hasn't been "grabbing" me. It isn't that I don't know who the characters are or what is happening. I see the commercials during my other shows. And I have watched it in the past.


So.... at 12:45 All My Children from Monday is on Soapnet. Perfect, thinks I. This should be a snoozefest. I roll over with my back to the television. Remember the volume is on "2," so I can barely hear it. JR comes in yelling at Annie to kiss him. What the hell? I sit straight up in bed, crank the volume up to "4" and watch the two of them yell at each other, followed by several bouts of kissing and more yelling. What just happened says me to me? The show cuts to other scenes. Blah blah blah. Then commercial. More blah blah blah. Finally it comes back to JR and Annie who are still yelling and kissing. That is punctuated by his leaving with a slammed door and then his cousin, Scott, walks in shortly after. Annie boohoos about JR ruining her time with Scott, but says she "told" JR to leave. Say what? Then more blah blah blah. That was when I realized that this was Monday's show. In a few minutes, Tuesday's show would start and they would keep coming until they got through Friday.

I immediately dug around for the channel changer. *Danger Will Robinson.* I had to get off this channel. I would be up all night on this channel. I clicked until I found HGTV. House and Garden TV. My mother loves this show. It knocks me right out. I set it back to "2." When I felt myself getting woozy, I turned it off.

Right now, I find myself eyeballing the clock. It is ten minutes to eight. Do I really want to get sucked back into All My Children? Not really. Although, I do have to admit that JR is one of the more compelling characters on that show. In fact, I have been thinking about him on and off all day today. Not so much that scene with Annie that I watched last night, but this other time. Back in 2005, I watched AMC for the first time. It was JR that lured me in then, too. Back then he was involved with Babe. That is really not a great name btw, but the actress was really something. And they were electric together. Anyway, I was still working, when I could at that time (I was in sales and spent a lot of time in my car), and I would listen to my soaps on the radio. I was driving down the road when they aired these scenes (the ones below). In fact, I never even saw them until today. Anyway, JR hit me in the heart that day SO HARD that I started crying and couldn't stop. I had to pull over because I couldn't see to drive the car. Yep, that's some pretty serious crying. Oh yeah, you have to turn off my music player at the bottom of the page....








Anyway, if you watched the videos you know that it was all about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a powerful thing. It's a beautiful thing.

So, did it make you cry? Did you fall in love with JR just a little bit? Did it make you want to run out and tell someone that you're sorry? Did you realize you were carrying a heavy load hauling all that anger around when you watched that? Didn't it make you want to put it down?

A NEW TWIST ON A CURVY ROAD

It has occurred to me that I got it wrong again. Not completely wrong. Just somewhat wrong. Do you remember my interpretation of my recent dream? I didn't get it quite right. I knew that I was somewhere off the target because I really wasn't dealing with forgiveness issues. I did an inward trek and I was good. I'm not saying that it wasn't a yuck situation and there were no good choices, but I did what I had to do, and I know it, and I'm good with it. So, that means I wasn't the person yelling at my mom (who was actually me) in the dream. That begs the question of who was...

"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."
~Emily Bronte


Yesterday I got a call from H-girl on the cell phone that she shares with C-Man to wish me a Happy Mother's Day. Our conversation didn't last very long. It went something like this:

Her: Happy Mother's Day.

Me: Thank You. What are you doing?

Her: Putting on fake toenails.

Me: Seriously? Why?

Her: Because they're cool.

Me: What's wrong with your real ones?

Her: Nothing. But I've glued my fingers together with the glue that comes with them, and I can't get my fingers apart.

Me: That's not good. Read the instructions on the bottle to see what it says to do if this happens.

Her: It says to run your fingers under hot water and gently pull apart.

Me: Well, you should probably do that sooner rather than later. Why don't I talk to your brother while you take care of that.

Her: Okay.

Him: Hi Mommy.

Me: Hey, whatcha doing?

Him: Playing a video game.

Me: Oh. (I don't ask questions because this will initiate a detailed explanation of the game.) So, how's school going.

Him: Much better.

This conversation goes on for about five minutes with details of his classes.

Me: Has your sister gotten her fingers unstuck yet?

Him: No ma'am.

Me: Okay, well, have her call me back when she does. Love you.

Him: Love you, too. Bye.

Me: Bye.

She didn't call back and I didn't expect her to. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was excellent strategy on her part. She could claim to have made the Mother's Day call, and not feel guilty, and at the same time she picked a time to call when she knew I would tell her to get off the phone to take care of a more pressing problem (her glued fingers). She covered all of the bases. She is one smart little cookie, that one.


When my ex and I divorced, C-Man took it hard, but H-Girl was wrecked. At the time, I know that she laid the blame squarely at the feet of her father. I will never forget driving her home from something within six months of the divorce. She liked to make up songs. It drove C-Man crazy, because they were tuneless, and monotone, and she flew by the seat of her pants with them. However, when she and I were alone in the car, I let her sing as many of them as she wanted. They were living in the apartment, and she was singing about how much she hated the apartment, and how she wished she still lived in the old house, and that it was all daddy's fault. The way that she worded the whole thing was so perceptive that she blew me away. I mean she nailed it.

A year later, C-Man moved in with his grandparents, and it was just H-Girl in the apartment, and I was moving to FL because I was so sick. She did very poorly in school that year, and I talked to my ex about it because H-Girl was not flourishing at all. I was hanging by a thread, but she was going down. I asked him to let her move in with me and my parents in FL the following school year. He told me that she could stay with me that summer, and if it worked out, than yes. We were one month into the summer when something he said alerted me to the fact that no matter how it worked out, it was no. He just wanted free babysitting for the summer. I was still so sick and he was still taking advantage of me. He made me so angry that when I got C-Man for a week-long visit at the six week mark, I took them both back after that. I told him that I wasn't free babysitting.

When my ex and I divorced, it was always my plan to have H-girl move back in with me at the point that I got well. I never foresaw the move to FL. In fact, I didn't think I would still be this sick now. I thought that right about now would be when I was GOOD again. It would be when I was at my best again. Fully functional and independent. Instead... I can't even take care of me. I am still living with my parents.

So, who was that in my subconscious? Who do I think is so angry with me? Who do I think blames me for leaving them in the crumbling house of pain? Who feels abandoned and angry? I'd give you three guesses, but I don't think you need any.

She gives me a lot of "whatever" when I call, and she might still have her fingers stuck together. Does she love me? Yes. Is she angry with me? Yes.

THIS ISN'T YOUR USUAL PILLOW TALK

Do you ever have conversations with God? In the middle of the night I started getting this sore throat and I knew I was getting sick. I actually had the good sense to get up and start dosing myself with vitamin C. My father believes high doses of vitamin C at the onset of illness will ward it off. So, I took two or three grams (two or three thousand milligrams) and brought the bottle back to bed, since I was waking up on the hour. When I would fall back to sleep I was having this crazy dream about people returning gifts to me, and I was really ticked about it. It was really nice stuff and they were bringing it back "just because." They had no good reason. They just didn't want it. Who does that? If you don't want it, you regift it. Everyone knows that.

Like I said, I was waking up on the hour and popping a couple of vitamin C. While I was in this in-between state, I was aware of having these conversations with God about this whole crazy gift thing. Unfortunately, I can't remember now precisely what God said. The only thing I do know was that I didn't like it. It was all philosophical and God probably wanted me to be the better person. It was that sort of thing. I didn't want to be the better person. I wanted to drive across town and do some ass kicking. In lieu of that, I wanted to verbally knock someone (actually several people from the amount of gifts I remember from these dreams) into next week.

The last time I woke up, took my vitamin C, and went down again, I could see God talking but couldn't hear a thing. The mouth was moving but the volume was off. And I do remember being able to do some lip reading. Again, I have no memory recall of what was actually said. I think it was because I was still not liking the message. This time I was doing some talking of my own into my pillow. I said something like, "I am really glad that's over. You are really annoying. If you can't say something helpful, You really should just keep it to Yourself."

Did you read that blog I wrote about my mom? If you didn't, it's called THIS ONE'S FOR MOM. (Check that out. It's a link to my old blog. I actually did something techy and it worked. Woohoo. Thanks Patsy. ) Mom and I had issues in my teenage years because Mom was always so right about things. Jesus told us that God is the Father. Our Father. The Father. Everyone's Father. He is the Most Right. It only stands to reason that a person like me is going to find that extremely annoying. The beauty of that is that God understands me better than anyone else. It's called omniscience. Look it up. He's also more forgiving than anyone else.

It's funny. When I started this blog, I really didn't intend to stay stuck in my dream or my interaction with God. It was going to be my segue, that was kind of odd, into something else. Turns out that I think I know what God was saying, even though I still don't actually "remember" it. He was telling me to be more forgiving of those people who are returning my really nice "gifts." After all, He is forgiving of me when I tell Him to buzz off because he is annoying and He's God. Usually, I am the first person to love the metaphor. Today, not so much. But you get what you get.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world"
~Gandhi