Ticking time bomb or future King?

I just sat down to write something that I thought would be therapeutic about an event that took place when I was fourteen. Something that, as I'm finding in therapy, has affected me far more than I gave it credit for doing. I thought if I wrote it out just for myself, and wrote out an "alternate ending," I would feel better. I still plan to do that, but then a thought occurred to me. If an adult writes a fictional piece about people killing others for any reason, sometimes revenge, other times for sheer joy, no one blinks. Some adults make a rather lucrative living off violently slaughtering fictional innocents in ways far more terrifying than via a shooting spree. If Stephen King wrote about a high schooler going on a killing spree, it would be a best seller. (It is possible that he already wrote about this. Wasn't Apt Pupil about that? I'm sorry Mr. King, I haven't read all your stuff. I'm more of a Koontz girl. But I love your movies and think you're awesome. Although I'm a little bitter about that damn clown.)

However, teenagers, frustrated with the social pressures and ridiculous games played out in high schools across the country, are not permitted this same freedom of creative expression. If a senior English Lit student writes about slaughtering his classmates, he's yanked out of school, expelled at best, and arrested at worse. It is assumed that he is mentally unbalanced, plotting another Columbine. He needs to be removed, studied, possibly sent far away for the protection of the other children. He is immediately guilty of harboring a desire to turn his fiction into reality.

Where is the logic in that? Where is the logic in denying a creative student an outlet for all that teenage angst intensified by adolescent hormones? Have there been actual scientific studies stating that if a teenager writes about murdering his classmates, he'll actually go out and do it? I'd like to see some hard, unbiased data on this. I'm pretty sure all across the country, teenagers are scribbling in their journals (do they still even use paper journals anymore?) about flaying the homecoming queen or castrating the quarterback. If every kid who wrote or thought about it actually did it, we wouldn't have very many high schools now would we? So where is the logic? Preemptive strike maybe? The US seems to be very fond of preemptively striking against other countries, so it shouldn't be surprising they'd do it to even the youngest of their citizens.

When I was a senior in high school, several years before Columbine turned the school system into a place of paranoia and over-reaction, I wrote a story in which another student I did not like was brutally impaled by a hockey stick. I handed it in to my teacher (a Catholic nun). She wasn't thrilled, she told me I shouldn't harbor such feelings of hatred, but that was the end of it. I still received a good grade for the quality of the writing. I did not go on to kill anyone. I never would, except possibly in self defense. I grew up to be a pretty good person, or at least I think so. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I handed that in today.

I feel for teens today, I really do. As obnoxious as they can be (I'm sure I was just as bad), it has to be more than a little disconcerting to know that if you write or say the wrong thing, even if it's just an innocent creative writing exercise, your entire school career can be destroyed. But don't despair, just keep your mouths shut and your pens still until you graduate. Then, suddenly, you're no longer a threat to society if you write about killing the prom queen.

"I can do it!"

I am beginning to really dread those words when they come out of my almost-four-year-old. As a mother, I am certainly very proud of how independent Jacob is becoming. I'm proud that he uses the potty and never has an accident, I'm proud that he can dress himself, clean up his own messes (when he chooses, unfortunately that's the one time he says "I can't do it!"), and has mastered the mouse and keyboard so he can endlessly play at NickJR.com. Really, I'm very proud of my son. He's amazing, he learns something new every day, and he has limitless energy.

But as a human being prone to great impatience, hearing those four little words- I can do it!- in a tone that says "back off Mommy, if you try to button these pants, I'm taking out your eye!" makes me cringe on more occasions than not. The phrase usually comes as we're trying to get out the door for an appointment for which we're already late because Jake had to make sure the Wonder Pets really did save the day, or Map gave proper directions for Dora to reach her destination, or those meddling kids and their dog actually could solve the mystery. So we're already late, and my darling boy is trying to button the most impossible pair of pants, because Mommy didn't make it to the laundry mat (our washer is broken) and those are the only clean pair left. The mere suggestion that sometimes it is okay to ask for help sends him into a tantrum.

I stand there watching, waiting, alternating between thinking "I am throwing out every damn pair of pants that has buttons," "Please kiddo, please just ask Mommy for help," and "gee, I'm so proud of my little boy!' Seconds tick by, Jacob likes us to count to see how long it takes to put on his clothes. Each article starts back at zero. Eight seconds for undies, 15 for socks, twenty seconds for a shirt because he has to turn it round and round to make sure the tag is in the back. Then the pants. I stop counting at around fifty.

So intent on doing things himself is my son that he talks about it in his sleep. He woke up screaming last night. As I got him calmed down, he was crying over and over "I can do it, I want to do it, I can do it!" I asked him "What baby? What can you do?" His response- "Be Spongebob." Uh, alright kiddo, that's one thing Mama can't help you with, so go for it.

I'd rather be smart than sane

As you can tell, if you're paying attention, I lost interest in the whole "self help" experiment days ago. I tried to take it seriously, but every book I checked out of the library bored me practically to tears. It's not that I don't want to be helped, I just think there are better ways of going about it. I go to therapy every other week. My therapist is awesome. She tells me that all the things I feel, all the things I worry about, are perfectly normal. I'm not a freak, I'm not all that insane. We make progress. I figure that by making myself go every other week, I'm helping myself. So why drag myself and anyone who may actually be reading this through a tedious experiment when I think we all know what the end result would be. I am trying to change my way of thinking, but not because a book told me how to do it. I'm trying to be more positive, less doom and gloom. Although quite often, the only thing I'm "positive" about is the fact that I'm pretty screwed right now. But at least I'm positive about something! Yay for that!

Instead of self-help, I'm going back to my great love: self-education. Ever since Jake was born, I've grown lax on my goal to learn everything there is to know about everything under the stars. I did go to school and took some pretty difficult and intense classes, but that can't be classified as self-education. I used to pick a subject, absorb as much information as possible on it, then move on. I learned more about sleep in a month than most people learn in a lifetime (although none of it stuck apparently, because here I am at 2am wide awake. I'm usually just getting off the phone about now, but someone got his ass kicked by cold medicine, so I'm making do with the internet).

I think the pursuit of knowledge is one of the most important adventures a human can take. I think too many people are too content to learn only what they need to know for their chosen field, or worse, learn nothing at all and let other people figure things out for them. I want to know everything. I want to know how the human body works, how ancient civilizations survived, how a microscopic bug can wipe out millions, why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. I don't understand how so many can be happy to just know how to eat, sleep, breathe, and fuck.

So instead of reading random, boring self-help books, I'm currently reading Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum. I've learned a lot about the horrible things our country has done to other countries in the world. I don't understand how we, the people, did not know about these things before, and if we did, why the hell we would let it continue. It hasn't exactly been the cathartic, healing sort of experience that I would have gotten from, say, the Secret, but it's been enlightening and at least I'm learning something.  I highly recommend it. Next, I'm either going to further educate myself on censorship of the press throughout history, or read about the various parts of the human brain more in depth than I went into in nursing school. Someday, I'll have amassed as much knowledge as my hero Ken Jennings, and will be able to kick ass on Jeopardy. That's always been the goal. Sane is great and all, but I'd really rather be smart. I kind of don't think you can have it both ways.

I Hate May

May is the worst month financially for me, because it is the month I have to register my car, get car insurance, and get the car inspected. I have yet to just take my car to be inspected and leave after paying the simple $20 fee. Last year, it cost over $500 to get it inspected, because it needed tires, bushings (I think that's what they're called, I keep calling them the wrong thing, they make your car not tip over when you turn), a tune-up, transmission fluid flushed and refilled (or whatever they did with it) and a few other things. Not all of these things were required to pass, but the guy made it sound like my car would explode if I didn't get it done, so I just kept saying "fine, whatever." This year, I don't have the money for "fine, whatever." So when he came at me with a list a mile long of things I needed to do to make my car survive another year, I burst into tears and started bawling in the middle of the Midas car service area. The list was narrowed down to four things that HAVE to be done, coming out to $350. Now, apparently, I'm getting a "good" deal on the work and parts, but when you don't have a damn job, $350 is an awful lot of money.

Car insurance is another fun thing. I've never had a ticket. I had one accident five years ago involving a turtle, but that's it. Yeah, okay, so that turtle incident totaled my car, but I had State Farm at the time and the bastards didn't even give me half of what my car was worth. So why does it cost $300 for six months just for liability? I had to drop everything else in order to afford the insurance. We had two cars on our old policy, and Rich had like five tickets and four accidents in the last seven years. Everything was covered, and that only cost $688 for six months. Why is mine so high? That doesn't seem very fair.

May is just a crappy month. On the one hand, I hate living in a state that forces inspections, but on the other hand, if they didn't force it on me, I'd have no idea that my car was the death trap they claim it to be. I also think it's ridiculous to have to register your car every single year. A car should be registered once, unless you move. It's just another way for the state to steal more of the money I don't even have. May is coming to an end, and I still haven't registered the car or fixed all the crap that needs to be fixed. Screw you May.

Self-help for the self-helpless

Today, after applying for yet another job about which I'll probably never hear back, I decided to peruse the library for an hour. I love the library, filled with thousands of books (however, none of my extensive Amazon wish list books can ever be found there, much to my chagrin), people being obnoxiously quiet, and stacks high enough to hide me indefinitely from the outside world (also too high for me to actually reach anything, but they are kind enough to provide stools every three feet, so they get points for being short-person friendly). I like to go and just randomly browse a section or two in great depth. Today I somehow managed to choose the section that contains self-help books, followed by true crime and conspiracy books. Yes, I believe there is a connection between the two, but do we really want to get that far into my muddled way of thinking? Even my therapist gets a bit confused at times, and she is trained to understand crazy little minds.

I honestly do not get the appeal of the self-help book. This is a multi-million dollar market. The New York Times Bestseller's List now has, at least on Amazon, an entire list devoted to these types of books. Entire books dedicated to telling me how to transform my entire life by just changing the way I think. Books that tell me how to get rid of self-defeating behavior, how to think positive, how to think more like a man (oh the places I could go with this) , how to let go and let some form of higher power take over, and how to not "sweat the small stuff." All I have to do is read thier book, and my life will instantly be better.

Does it actually work for anyone? I really want to know. Will I read a book about the power of positive thinking and suddenly be freed from all the anxiety about my lack of gainful employment. Will I be struck with an epiphone about my true calling in life after reading a few passages from the ever famous "What Color is Your Parachute?" Can I learn to love myself and find self-worth by reading a book of the same title?

I don't think it can work. My mother is an adamant believer that it can. We have argued this point many times. I think we all know ourselves well enough to understand our own mindset. Saying to ourselves "snap out of it, think positive!" is not going to instantly change our lives. I am, by nature, pessimistically optomistic at best. When my serotonin levels are up, I think everything is going to be just dandy, and everything will work out the way it is supposed to. When they're down, I'm convinced the universe is conspiring to keep me miserable for the rest of my life. I already know exactly what is wrong with me. I know where all my problems stem from, I know what makes me the way I am. Can a few thousand words on a page actually change my entire life?

So I'm embarking on an experiment. For the next two months, I will read every self-help book that I can fit in to my already busy schedule of moping around, crying about my lack of finances, and stressing over the lack of color in my parachute. So, probably about four. I'll actually follow the advice in the books. If, at the end of that sixty days, I have found some major insight into my own way of thinking and managed to completely turn it around, won the lottery by the sheer power of positive thought, or even found a job I actually love, then I'll admit defeat. If not, well, I get nothing, because I can barely take on a multi-million dollar industry and convince them to admit they're wrong. I get the satisfaction of knowing that I'm right though, even if no one else feels the same.

So watch for the new "Pretty Nameless Self-Helpless Experiment Blog," which I'll link here as soon as I create it.

Hypocrite Mommy, and proud of it.

Before I ever got pregnant, there were a few things I swore I would never do when I had a child. I tried to keep the list very short, because I know people always say "well, my kid will never..." and that never works out well. I never swore that my kid wouldn't watch TV, because I watched more TV as a child than is recommended by every form of parenting expert out there, and I still had/have a very active imagination. I never said I would force my child to be a vegetarian, although I prefer he not eat mammals. That didn't work out of course, my dear friend Dana introduced him to pig in the form of ring bologna and he never looked back. But that's fine, I wasn't planning to force my dietary preferences on him (except when it comes to rice. I don't want my kid eating something that looks like maggots. Ewwwwww!).

But there were a few things that I swore I'd never do or let him do. The first is put a TV in his room before he was at least ten. My reasoning was that no child actually needs to have electronics in their room at age two. No two year old should be sitting alone in their room anyway. I thought having a TV before he even started real school would make him spoiled. Who am I kidding? The house already looks like an extremely fertile Toys R Us had wild, passionate sex with Amazon and delivered a healthy litter of bunnies, which then exploded all over the house. The boy is the epitome of spoiled. So Friday, after much thought (mostly because it was easier to just pretend I was mulling it over rather than actually get off my ass and rearrange the boy's entire room), I caved. My son is now the proud second-hand owner of a spare 20" flat screen TV. My darling almost-four year old can now watch his countless educational programs (see previous post) from the comfort of his very own Spiderman bed, cuddled up in his Spiderman blanket, surrounded by his Spiderman decals. The Spiderman franchise really should be paying my kid for all the advertising he gives them. Note that I do not even have a flat screen TV because I can't afford one big enough to thoroughly enjoy such educational programming as Supernatural, Ghost Whisperer, and Bones. We originally bought the crappy, not even HD, flat screen so that I could watch DVD's in my room since the soon-to-be-ex would never give up the decent-sized one in the living room.

The second thing I swore I'd never do is take my kid to the circus. Circus' are cruel. Elephants, camels, and bears do not belong in small cages, being hustled from town to town on a silly train, forced to perform in front of a live audience. Plus, even the non-animal abusing circus' have clowns. I think we all know my stance on clowns. If not, you need to read back a bit further. To recap- clowns are bad, evil lurks behind that painted grin, and I'm not entirely convinced they don't think I'd make a good supper. So the circus has two very strong, very legitimate strikes against it. Guess what I'm doing on May 20? Yup. Taking my sweet little boy and his sociopathic imaginary friend to the circus. In fact, we're combining my fear of clowns and disdain for animal torture with something else I love so much- driving to Camelback Mountain, around hairpin turns, possibly in the dark if I can't make the early show, and trying to find parking in a lot that was clearly designed for people who can actually grasp the concept of backing out of spaces less than six inches from the bumper of the next car. Have we discussed my driving issues yet?

So there it is. Two things I swore would never happen, and both are happening in the same month. I'm a hypocrite. I openly admit it. But whatever, my kid is happy, which is all that really matters to me. Also, Zee Zee the sociopath is happy, which means she may not carve me into small pieces while I sleep.

ZeeZee, the imaginary friend

Jacob has a new imaginary friend. Her name is ZeeZee. I'm fairly convinced she is a sociopath at best, a demonic entity at worse. ZeeZee arrived about a week or so ago, apparently from outer space, where she returns when she's not hanging out inspiring my son to perform wicked acts. I learned tonight that she is 18. A little old for my not-quite four year old, don't you think? She doesn't come around when I'm here.

Since her arrival, ZeeZee has taught my son the word "bullshit," told him all about cutting people during surgery, and taught him a few new games that I'm not sure I really want to know about. I swear, I didn't teach him to say "bullshit." I rarely use that word. I use a lot of other words that I wouldn't want him to repeat, but I've never been a fan of the way "bullshit" flows off the tongue. It is possible he heard it from his father months ago, while his father was still around. It's possible he heard it on TV in passing, although I'm pretty careful about limiting his television watching to such calming and educational influences as Spiderman, Power Rangers, and Scooby Doo. It is unlikely that his imaginary friend taught it to him, therefore she must be a demonic entity. It's only logical.

I'm not at all freaked about the sudden emmergence of ZeeZee. I had four imaginary friends with equally strange names. One was very mischievous. I understand that he has a lot to work out in his little brain. Daddy left, Mommy is stressed a lot, and George W. Bush is still a free man. It's a lot of confusion to comprehend for a tiny little mind. But ZeeZee is downright creepy! My therapist (doesn't that sound so metro?) claims that nothing jumps out at her as being strange, and that ZeeZee is a perfectly normal, rational response for a child his age. But my therapist doesn't have to hide the knives in case ZeeZee convinces Jacob that he is perfectly in his right to skip eight years of medical school, surgical internships and residencies (I watch Grey's Anatomy, I know what schooling you need to cut into people) and move right on to the solo surgery.

Can someone recommend a good exorcist?

Selling passion

I suck at this whole blogging thing, and keeping up with it. I gave fair warning though, I would be all into it for about a month, then start to dwindle off. I am back with a renewed dedication. That should last about a week. I had a busy month, and my internet access has been rather intermittent lately (got into a fight with a Verizon tech guy, but that's a whole other story). I filed for divorce! Yay! I'm so excited. Of course, I have no clue if I did it right. I wont know until I don't get a divorce basically. I can call, and maybe they can tell me if everything is going through, but maybe they cant. Although, I was given a covert nod that the papers looked okay, so I'm optimistic. I sent papers my husband, he promised to sign them, and I've finished typing up the remaining forms. If all goes well, I'll be divorced shortly after my birthday, which is at the end of July. Happy Birthday to me. Seriously, I'm throwing a party. I think he will too though, so at least we're finally on the same page.

The husband has a new girlfriend, one that I actually approve of. Not that it's any of my business, but I figure if eventually he's going to take Jacob for a visit, then I'd rather have him dating a nice woman with a Master's Degree rather than a girl in jail for selling meth. Yes, Meth Girl was an option, I'm not making that up. So he's moving on, I've moved on, we're all happy, or on our way to happy.

I still can't find a freaken job. Why is it so damn hard to find someone who will hire me? I can't even get a goddamn interview, and it's starting to piss me off. I'm a good employee, these people don't know what they're missing. Screw them. I'm thinking about selling sex toys with my friend. Why not? There are lots of lonely people out there in need of battery operated boyfriends, right? Heck, even the not so lonely like a few enhancements now and then. It's better than prostitution, right?