Thirty One, It's A Whole Lot Weirder Than Thirty For Some Reason

I'm not sure how it happened, but somehow another year passed and I'm 31 today.

WHAT?!

When I was a kid 31 seemed soooooooo oooooooold. Now I know that all those mothers and adults and teachers I though were ancient, were really just sitting around thinking, "How am I old enough to be that kid's mom? I mean, I got drunk last night and made out with a sailor. I might still be a little drunk right now. Thirty something year olds don't do that, do they? Ok, fine. So it wasn't really a sailor, it was just the father of my kid, but I was pretending he was a sailor in my head so that counts right?"

Anyway, I decided I need a list of life goals to complete now that I'm in my thirties. So I made a list, a lofty list of goals, not for my life, but for the next year. A list to be completed before I'm 32. Making a list? That just got checked off my list. One down, tons more to go!

BIRTHDAY LIST OF GOALS SPECTACULAR! :

A list of lofty goals. To be completed before I turn 32.

1. Finish writing a book. I’ve got like seven started, just pick one and finish it. Worse comes to worse I’ve got a book I hate. But at least I can say I finished one.

2. Try not to get nails done for an entire year. Every time I get them done I rip them off three days later. (already I want to cross this one off my list because I love having my nails done, even if it is for a few days damnit.)

3. Run a third marathon.

4. Win third marathon.

5. Or at least, pretend to win when I cross the finish line at 4 hours and 55 minutes by holding hands up in the air and shouting, “CHAMPION OF SLOW MARATHONS!”, and get Becky and Math Teacher to suspend me over their heads like an actual champion.

6. Can up the drama by pushing baby in a stroller during entire marathon thus, when cross the finish line can say, “CHAMPION OF BABY PUSHING!” Or can use puppy if baby is uncooperative.

7. Actually finish Anna Karenina. Or War and Peace. Or Moby Dick. Something that is long and foreign. Not sure if Moby Dick is foreign, but it’s about a whale and the sea or something, and since I’ve never been a captain of a ship, it’s foreign to me.

8. Make a weekly comic.

9. First decide what comic should focus on.

10. Decide on own! Do not spend seven hundred hours re-reading online comics. That doesn’t make you productive it just makes you a dork. A thirty-one year old dork.

11. Do more yoga.

12. Train James to not scream his ass off at 3am, but rather to be a calm sleepy kitty that does not walk across chest in the middle of the night and stop to get nose to nose, scaring the living daylights out of me, before meow-yelling and jumping onto stomach then off bed.

13. Find out what “scaring the living daylights out of me” actually means. Living daylights? Are there un-living daylights? Like zombie daylights? Vampire daylights that go around inside of people just waiting to be scared out. Is very strange saying.

14. Swim to the bouy in Catalina. Or at least, watch people swim there as just remembered water is not actual water – is ice that has recently been melted into fooling you it’s water, but is actually just an illusion. Is giant ice cube bodysuit.

15. Eat lots of (un-massacred) donuts in Catalina.

16. Fall asleep tanning (with sunscreen on) on beach in Catalina while reading same book as Gabi. Try not to get the hiv. (Becky and I get blisters on our hands and feet every year [which we call the hiv, because it sounds better than what it actually is] in Catalina because it’s the first time our paper-like skin has been exposed to so much sun in a year and every year it hurts, and sucks, and is ugly. This year I will NOT get the hiv!) (But if I do I will not have a donut the next day as punishment.)

17. Have donut anyway, because am thirty one! Can eat donuts whenever I please!

18. Make out a lot. Just because am in thirties does not mean making out goes out the window. Making out should be re-upped and re-awesome because can think in head, “I’m making out with someone in their thirties! Sixteen year old me is sooooooooooooooo jealous right now!”

19. Write a letter to unborn baby apologizing in advance for all the embarrassing things I may or may not say or do to it. Like talking about making out. Be very sincere, as am sure will have a lot to apologize for, as sometimes cannot control mouth/body when it needs to talk/dance. Try to focus on fact that I will try very hard not to talk about my boobs or other people’s boobs if child does not like it. However, will continue to talk about boobs when child is not in ear shot, because I mean, c’mon . . . what’s not to talk about.

20. Spend more time singing on the phone to my brother.

21. Spend more time singing on the phone to my sister, even though she hates it. (Do not want either of the twins to feel left out)

22. Tell my friends and family how much I love them.

23. I love you guys!

Well, at least I can check one off the list already! I’ll get started on all the others after my birthday nap. Or two.

Killer Of All Things, Living Or Not

So, James has a new thing. Since we moved, he's trapped in the house again and thus has to hunt things he normally wouldn't have to hunt. Instead of bringing live animals into the house and then slaughtering them before my very eyes, he has to resort to other, less bloody (sometimes) options.

ie; hunting and then killing the exposed area of my back through the open slats of my chair. I'm not sure why this is a fun chase for him, except that he loves to be able to attack through things, and reaching through the chair to my now scratched-to-hell-back skin is like reaching his paws through jail bars and scratching the eyes out of a nearby inmate.

Or sometimes he'll stalk, carefully circle, then strike my hairbrush DEAD. Like, d. e. a. d., dead. I have about fifteen things out on my little bathroom stand, but he always goes for the hairbrush, as if it said something mean about his mother once and he's gonna keep killing it and walking around with it in his mouth like a gay tiger until he feels his mother has been revenged.

And then, there's the newest attack - the cereal stalk.

This is the worst because I can't eat breakfast in peace anymore. Now I have to deal with this.

First the hunter eyes his prey. Slowly, without the Raisin Bran noticing, he creeps up on it.

Then once he sees the Raisin Bran doesn't notice him, he'll get even closer. Just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

Then - I couldn't get a picture of it, because I was too busy being drenched in milk and soggy cereal - James gets both of his paws up in the cereal bowl and splashes around in it until he feels it has been sufficiently clawed to death. Thus ruining my breakfast time once again.

Of course after he's done with all that, he gets a little thirsty and drinks the rest of my water.

Sometimes it takes me three tries before I can actually eat an entire breakfast.

I do not wanna know what he's going to do when I have waffles tomorrow.

Still Thirty

My mom called this morning to remind me I'm getting older. Which is always nice.

Because I still feel sixteen I don't ever feel guilty for not finishing writing a book, or not finishing nursing school, or not finishing Anna Karenina - because I'm sixteen. Who's got time for that? I've got making out to do yo, I can't waste precious time reading a classic. Plus I've got years and years to do all that other stuff, I mean I'm only mother f-ing sixteen!

"You're in your thirties."

"No, I'm thirty."

"That doesn't make you in your twenties sweetie, I hate to break it to you."

"I hate to break it to you, but yeah it does."

So, I don't feel guilty for not finishing things until my mom, who is supposed to support my delusions as a loving mother, insists on ruining my lifelong daydreams and snaps me back into reality with her "logic" and "facts" and "those aren't sixteen year old thighs though, are they honey?".

(Just kidding, she wouldn't say that to me. My sister and I could weigh seven hundred pounds and she would still be all, "Oh please, you're too skinny. Eat a damn cookie.")

When I tried to point out that she was also getting older her response was:

"Oh no, I talked about it with Becky and she's going to stay 29 and I'm going to stay 59! Isn't that great?"

"What about me?"

"What about you?"

"You guys stay young but I don't?"

"Well, one of us has got to get older honey."

"Why does it have to be me?!"

"Because Becky and I already talked about it."

"I don't like your logic here."

And I don't. I really don't.

So, now I'm feeling guilty for not finishing things because I (temporarily) remember how old I actually am. Thus I will be trying to write two hundred pages today, while practicing giving shots to oranges, and taking breaks only to read four hundred pages of a Russian novel.

If my hands, ears, and various body parts are bleeding tomorrow, you'll know why.

It's because I'm in my thirties.

Warning: Overly Melancholy Post That Doesn't Even Mention The Fact I Made An Entire Oreo Cheesecake For Myself Today Not Because I Was Sad Just Hungry

I'm so in love with Patty Griffin right now that I'm having a hard time focusing on Glee - even though I loooooved it - it's just that I recently put her back on my "baking" playlist which has sort of turned making brownies into more of a gut wrenching/crying-my-eyes-out-in-the-kitchen-in-the-middle-of-the-day-with-my-pants-unbuttoned sort of thing, than it is a let's-bake-a-tasty-treat sort of a thing.

I mean, just listen to this. Just listen and tell me you don't feel a stirring in your soul you haven't felt since you were in High School and everything was emotional to a fault, and then once you got older things started to dry up, and close off, and put itself into a complete emotional coma so you could actually get through life instead of just feeling heartbroken and devastatingly gloriously happy all at the same time for tiny little things like when Angela held hands with Jordan Catalano for the first time. Or when the guy you were (secretly) in love with laughed at something you said in class and you thought you were going to melt through the floor into a puddle of something that resembled mercury - all silver and moving like waves on the carpet and if touched cut into a million pieces. Or when your brother moves out of the house and into a group home, and then one day you walk past his room expecting to see him in there laughing at one of his secret little jokes with himself and it's takes you a good ten seconds to remember he moved out two years ago, and is so happy where he is - but still it makes you curl up onto his race car bed and fall asleep there until dinner.

Listen and tell me this doesn't make you feel like that. Or however you felt when you were in High School. (And if you were one of those kids who made it through teenager-hood without some sort of misplaced passion for everything, then I can not ever relate to you. Sorry.) (Just kidding, you're probably much better off.)

(The video is lame, so you can just stare at a picture of a rainy landscape if it helps. Like this one.)

And now I've run out of time to explain why I loved Glee (boy kisses!), but I will tomorrow (kissing of boys!) when I've had time to re-watch it (the scene where the boys are cute and they kiss!) and can pinpoint exactly what made this episode so good (not a tiny kiss but a full on sweet, romantic kiss!).

Licking Things

I haven't written in a while because I cut my hair and got really sick.

Not in that order, I got sick, and somewhere in the fever-induced delirium I cut my hair off, and didn't cry. Because I'm growing. Or because I was too sick to do anything but fall asleep as she hacked off my pony tail, but still - Progress!

I'm still sick (mono?) but I'm well enough now to leave bed and do things like, brush my teeth, and smile, so that's fun. James is not the biggest fan of me spending all day in bed, I think it's kind of freaked him out because he'll coming screaming through the house to my room, at the top of his little kitty lungs, like he's lost me - every single day - and has to go shouting for me through the corridors until he finds I've been hiding away in the North wing with the Duchess.

I hear it starting sort of softly, like a distant siren, and then it gets louder and louder as he approaches the bedroom, stops - looks up at me - and continues yelling. As if the louder, and the longer he does it the more likely it is I'll be able to understand him. Once he finds me he's thrilled for a second, and then rolls around and immediately falls asleep - presumably because the effort of locating me several times a day for weeks on end is just too exhausting for him.

Anyway, he's being a little weird. And then today after his screaming routine he found me at my desk, dusting off my laptop, and fell asleep on top of my toast. I made some new toast and then came back and got to work, and I must have been really into it because I didn't pay attention to when he woke up or what he was doing, because when I looked up the little sucker was carefully, and very sneakily licking my colored pencils.

Licking them like they were kitten lollipops I left out as a special treat for him. He was purring, he was so happy with his tasty find, and when I looked at him with disgust and a split second "Hmm, I wonder if that is good," he looked at me from the corner of his eye and was like:

"What?"

"They're pencils, and they're wood-y."

"James, what are you doing?"

"What?"

"What are you doing?"

"Licking pencils."

"Why? What are you doing?"

"I don't think that's good for you."

"Are you sure?"

And that went on for a while, where he'd lick, I'd ask him something, he'd stop to yell, lick, yell, lick - until that wore him out and he started the weirdest stretching routine directed right at me, and done right on top of my laptop so I would extra notice him.

After the last lick he shut his eyes really slowly at me, and then opened them, like he was trying to be sexy, then started what I can only describe as yoga.

Some sort of weird sun salute.

Then directly into....

Downward dog.

Then he flipped over and, hanging off the desk like a bat, he fell asleep because he apparently just got way too tired after his four seconds of stretching to make it anywhere else but dangling precariously off a ledge for his nap time.

I'm afraid he might have narcolepsy.

(**James is not a calico cat, he's black and white, but my black and white drawings weren't as cute as the eye patch-y one so, there you go.**)

Portlandia

I was having a really plain day last week that was threatening to become cry-worthy (due to a combo of being ridiculously hormonal - combined with the fact that it's tax season - combined with the fact that I have been watching Oprah, and all that lady does is try to make me sob myself to sleep at 4pm.) (Seriously, don't switch from Ellen to Oprah unless you want to have your soul ripped apart.) (Oh, but it's ripped apart so good.)

Anyway, it was a weird day, and then out of the blue one of my bff's Kevin sent me this (because he sensed my tears?) and it made me so happy I can't even tell you! I keep watching it over and over again, and it never gets old.

Just when you think it's funny, you keep watching and it gets even better.

I used to spend every Sunday with Kev, going to brunch and then the movies, and then spending the rest of the day at Barnes and Noble and Cold Stone. It was like a religion. It was the Church of Kevin.

And now I get joy on Sundays through funny clips he sends me, or Britney Spears mash-ups. It's a poor man's second. (Yeah, not even a poor man's Sunday - it's like second best, but a poor man's second best.) My sappy point is that I miss me some of him. And his dance moves.

But at least for now, we have Portlandia to get us through. And oh man, does it ever.

Pepe Le James

I don't even know where to begin.

I'll start at the end:

I've just washed every single thing that is washable in my house, and I'm about to wash it all again. Sheets, clothes, couch cushions, James, my hair, even the little things that keep a door closed - you know, those lipstick-top-shaped latches that pop into a hole when you close a door (sexual) so that it stays shut? Washed, and washed again.

Why?

Well, I'll have to go back to the beginning I guess:

Once upon a time I had a cat. Now I don't. Now I just have a little guy with dyed pink hair like he was trying to join a punk band or something but forgot it wasn't the 1980's anymore.

Opps, I'm at the end again. Sorry.

Once upon a time I had a cat. And a dog. And the dog woke me up barking his head off in the middle of the night. But not like a warning bark that he was about to kill an intruder, it was a sad, distressed bark like he needed to save someone from a burning building but we wouldn't let him out of the house.

So, I get up and see him at the window, and it smells vaguely like skunk, and I'm like, "Ok, we don't need to kill skunks at 3:30 in the morning, you're fine." Then a few minutes later James scratches at the window wanting to come in, presumably because he doesn't want to be where the skunk is either. So I open the window and let him in, and the smell comes wafting in, so I shut the thing as quickly as possible and try to fall back asleep.

But about two minutes later, the skunk smell has shifted, and it has turned into something way worse. It's like burning rubber, or dying bear set on fire, or a warning sign that the house is about to blow up. That's actually my fear, that the house is going to blow up. Because I'm very rational at 3 in the morning.

So, I go to check and make sure James hasn't blown up, when I discover it.

The little kitten is sitting by his food bowl, trying to stare up at me, with his ENTIRE HEAD plastered with skunk oil.

PLASTERED.

Like, I'm not kidding, it looks like he pulled up the skunk's tail himself, got about two centimeters from the spary zone and then pissed the dude off. He couldn't even open his poor little eyes because there was stuff EVERYWHERE. And he tried to meow his concern to me, but he couldn't open his mouth either because then the stuff would get all in there. It was soooooo sad and heart breaking, I felt like my child just came home from preschool covered in poo.

I don't know if you've ever smelled skunk up close and personal, but let me tell you it is one thousand times worse than that smell you get driving past an area where a skunk has just sprayed. That smell - that smell we all hate - is nothing, compared to something that has actually been sprayed. That smell is like a bed of fresh roses - I prayed for that smell all night.

Instead, the direct hit smell is like if someone took some teeny tiny rubber tires off of a truck, shoved them up into your nostrils and then lit them on fire with the body of your dead great uncle.

It was SO BAD.

I quickly googled skunk removal and it said tomato juice bath, or soda bath, or dish soap bath - so I decided I better go with all three, because I was in a complete panic that if I didn't try to get some of this stuff off of him we were all going to die and no one would want to come and claim the bodies because it would be too stinky and we'd just lay there rotting away, until a year from now when the officials decided to just burn the place down via satellite bombing.

We didn't have any tomato juice, but did have some brand new spicy bloody mary mix, so I grabbed that and heated it up in the microwave so it wouldn't be too cold on his little tiny head, and then grabbed some 7 Up (which I later found out you weren't supposed to use at all, by 'soda bath' they meant baking soda, but whatever), and some dish soap and proceeded to make the grossest concoction ever. It was like a bubbling witches brew. I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to mix them, but it was in the middle of the night, and I was about to pass out and three separate baths seemed like a horrible idea.

So, I grabbed James and locked the two of us in the bathroom, fairly certain that I was going to be leaving bloody, because cats do not like baths. Especially not spicy bloody mary, 7 Up, soap baths.

But I think he was just so distraught and defeated, and probably in pain, that my poor little sucker just sat there and let me douse him with my mix-drink-gone-wrong, until the whole bowl was empty. Then I shampooed him with some Herbal Essences.

Finally he could kind of open his eyes, and he looked up at me like, "Mom, that was so scary. I think I just saw Jesus."

And I was like, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry! Don't try to kill things that are your size anymore."

And he was like, "I'm going to lick myself now even though I really don't want to."

And he sort of paused and looked at his paw like, do I have to do this? Like, he was so sad he couldn't stop himself. He took a lick, and then looked up at me like, Oh my god what the hell is that!? That's what death tastes like.

By about 5:30 am I finally decided to try to get some sleep, and hoped to God sleeping with all the windows open would at least help me not to suffocate and it did. But it did not get rid of the smell a single ounce. So, I spent the entire day yesterday doing laundry and scrubbing, and lighting candles, all with the windows open so the 38 degree wind could maybe freeze out some of the stink.

I felt like I was on Little House on the Prairie meets Apocalypse Now, but with less fun.

And now James is walking around with all of his white hair dyed a beautiful spicy bloody mary pink - and I think he kinda likes it. He walks around with a little strut, and then will suddenly fall to his back to show me his pink belly, like, "Hey mom, check this out. I'm hard core. Like Avril."

And then he'll get up and strut to the bed, where he curls up and gets his skunky-ness all over my comforter. Which I will now have to wash for a fifth time.

Awesome.