Well

annie being goofy
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Young M is in trouble again. I don't want to talk or blog about it but jesus, I swear I don't know if I'll make it through these teenage years again. I'm just glad I only have two kids. If I'd had more I'd be in the loony bin by now - which actually sounds quite appealing, since I think I could well be perfectly happy taking lots of thorazine and making baskets out of toothpicks, although, given budget cuts, they probably don't have toothpicks anymore and the loonies have to make baskets out of fingernail clippings or something. Still, it's better than daily life, which, what with the crippling guilt - none of this would have ever happened if only I was a better parent / had managed to stay married / had married somebody with better genes and a normally functioning brain in the first place / had more money / had stayed home / had thrown the TV completely out / had eaten only organic wheatgrass / etc. - and the real paralysis of dealing with the here and now problems, has made it so that it's just no fun being a parent anymore. No fun at all and, as S & J pointed out last night when I met them for a quick drink while I was doing my weekly penance at the laundromat, every time I sort of stop being distracted by the conversation I say FUCK under my breath. Yeah. FUCK.

I'm also still waiting to hear about the house and I'm trying to maintain some kind of precarious magical balance in my thinking. See, if you start planning things like pulling up that heinous carpet and maybe there's wood underneath it which would be excellent with a sort of cherry stain particularly if one was to add a thin bead molding at the top of the walls, then you are guilty of hubris and counting your chickens before they are hatched, which means you won't get the house. But, on the other hand, if you think that there is no way you will get the house because you suck and nothing ever goes right for you since you were clearly born under a cursed sign, have bad karma and all is bleakness, plus you totally deserve to spend the rest of your (wretched, no doubt painfully diseased) life under a bridge in a soggy cardboard box, then you are guilty of negative thinking, which means you won't get the house. Therefore I am trying very hard not to think about the house at all, which isn't working very well either. Short version is I still don't know if it's going to happen or not. Sigh.

In other, slightly less bleak news, yesterday my brother B and I and young M and the QOB drove around Black Mountain searching for a place to have brunch. We also made a short trip around the Warren Wilson campus in an effort to impress upon young M the happy thought that, given a complete turnaround in attitude, he too could grow a beard, wear brown homespun and be a Warren Wilson student in a few years! He was unimpressed and the first restaurant we went to, which we know is good since J & C work there, had a 45 minute wait. We briefly considered another restaurant near that one, which had an expensive buffet, but the terrifying mole man (he snarled at my brother, who swears that he's seen him in horror movies) playing the piano caused us to lose all heart and retreat in fear. Then the car, which once belonged to my dad, took over and brought us to a fancy restaurant in a sort of hotel in the middle of nowhere near Montreat and that was actually pretty cool and completely the kind of place my dad would have found and waxed enthusiastic about. The QOB deemed it too old for her - fine for my mother, who is, after all, a whole 18 months her senior - but she enjoyed her french toast nonetheless and the Eggs Neptune (mental note: when, oh when, Felicity, will you learn that you live far from the seacoast and crab is dubious in the mountains?) didn't actually kill me or anything. So a good time was basically had by all.