It’s a sad fact of human nature that when we are in our most intimate moments we make faces that… well, that defy description.  We may also sweat, moan, sigh, grunt, scream, squeal, squeak, and there are other things too.  Things I won’t even get into.  The fact is sex would be gross and comical if we didn’t like it so much.

Actually, it gross and comical even when we like it so much.

And sex isn’t the only activity in which we engage that makes us look and sound ridiculous.  Watch the face of any athlete pushing herself to go further, faster, harder.  That’s not a pretty face.  The face made when someone sucks on an especially tart lemon?  Or takes a shot of cheap tequila? The yelp of pain a human voice can let out upon a tiny injury like a paper-cut or stubbed pinkie-toe. Or the wail of agony a man may let out when his favorite team loses some very important game.

All of these are downright pleasant, I fear, when compared with the face I make as I sing along half under my breath while playing Just Dance…  There’s a reason I don’t sing and dance in public.

A few weeks ago I made a somewhat severe dietary change.  There were reasons for it. Many many reasons.  Health.  Energy.  Vanity.  Age.  The fact that half my fucking clothes don’t fit.

I’ve been dragging for ages.  Not sleeping.  No energy.  Grumpy.  Yes, you heard me.  I’ve been grumpy.

So I needed a change, and to do that I needed a strict set of guidelines, otherwise… well let’s face it, even if we tell ourselves it’s an every once in a while treat, if you buy that bag of cheese puffs and that 12-pack of coke… they’re going to get consumed.  As is the bread.  Bagels.  Pizza.  Hash-browns.  Casserole.  Tacos…

I could have gone crazy and cut every bad thing in my diet out.  I could chew on twigs and berries morning, noon, and night and call it good  Except that wouldn’t be good, people.

That wouldn’t be good at all.

Food is this huge part of human condition.  We eat to stay alive.  We eat to be comforted.  We eat to be social.  We eat to indulge.  We eat food because it tastes awesome.  But sometimes the comforting, social, indulgent, awesome aspects of food get in the way of staying alive, or at least our health.  Both physical and mental.

And it was with all that in mind, and the hope that I could fit back into my favorite jeans, that I decided to change the way I eat.

Again.

And instead of eating only twigs and berries I thought I would go with something a little more sustainable, something my doctor had encouraged me to try years ago when  a blood sugar test that came back too high (it turned out to be a blip).  Cut out all those yummy, delicious, amazingly pointless processed carbs and sugars.

Try it for a few months. I told myself.  What can it hurt? I asked myself.  After a week something wonderful happened.  It kind of snuck up on me.  No I’m not talking about a mom pal asking me if I’d lost weight because she thought my ass looked great…

I’m talking about sleep.  Sleeping.  Snoozing.  Resting.  Dreaming.  And waking up refreshed with enough energy to make it through my crazy day without a nap.  Without yawning every few minutes.  Without being grumpy and hostile and so tired I just wanted to fall apart.

I never expected changing my diet to help me sleep.  So what, I told myself, it could be anything.  And then yesterday while hanging out with my brother I decided I needed ice cream.  Chocolate ice cream to be exact.  And there we were next the the Ben & Jerry’s and I found myself sucking down a glorious super duper chocolatey milk shake.  Oh. My. Fuck.  It was good.  For a few minutes.  While I was eating it.

And then I was hyper.  And then I was grumpy.  And then I wasn’t hungry for my delicious dinner.  And then I was tired, but I still had stuff to do.  And then when I finally got in bed to lay down I couldn’t fall asleep.  For the first time in weeks.  So I just lay there with my mind turning over and over again and again being awake for far too long.  And when I finally did fall asleep?  I woke up a couple of hours later.  And a couple of hours after that.  And after that it was just time to drag my groggy ass out of bed.

So… lesson learned?  Maybe.  I’m not entirely sure it was that milk shake… but given how much I’ve enjoyed my couple of weeks of blissful, productive, amazing sleep… I don’t think I’m willing to risk it at the moment.

So the diet change continues, just don’t mess with my booze…

Today was a should have day.  A would have day.  When I drifted off to sleep last night there were two sets of plans in my head.  My mind turned them each over and over reviewing and revising what needed to occur for both Plan A and Plan B until the possibilities for both had been exhausted.

I’m like that.  I like to have a plan.  It gives me a road map for my day.  Isn’t it funny though that I can’t really read a map to save my life?

Anyway, the should have.  The would have.

It should have been a snow day.  In Portland the lightest dusting of snow tends to shut down the entire city.  You’d think we’d never seen the fluffy frozen wet stuff in our life the way the news channels and the social networks get all a buzz with talk of snowpocalypse and snowmageddon.  The city shuts down.  The buses and trains get fucked up.  School is cancelled.

So when my alarm went off this morning and I learned that school had, in fact, not been cancelled or even delayed, that the city was proceeding as normal (Keep Portland Weird!  It’s as normal as we get), and that the buses were running on normal routes I scratched my head.  I crawled out of bed and made breakfast and lunch while glancing out the window at the clear brightening sky.  And that, my gentle readers, is when the snow began to fall.  I felt grownup and slightly mid-western as I walked my kid to school in the gently falling snow.  My Favorite Things played over and over in my head and as I started back home I was quietly singing along when a snowflake landed on my lashes.  And I smiled.  Nothing was sticking on the ground but there on my lashes a snowflake stayed.  Snow should have meant Plan B.  It should have thrown my day into utter chaos, instead, the snow rested gently on my lashes and clung to my hat and coat while slush sloughed around my boots and I went about Plan A… just a little more slowly.

I had the day I should have had, not the day I would have.  And it was happy.  And, you know, stuff.

Today, as I sat in the waiting room waiting for my girl’s class to finish, there was a problem. A disturbance. In the force, if you will. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.  They were totally in my head though…

But still, they needed silencing.

You see, someone stuck 3 stickers to the otherwise perfect, unadorned, totally clean half-wall.  Stickers. On the wall.

Now I don’t know about you, but there are some places I can’t stand to see stickers. Mirrors, windows, furniture, and of course walls all fit neatly on that list.

But these walls are not mine. I’m a guest here. A guest, sitting and patiently waiting for my kids class to finish…  Her 90 minutes class. And there were those stickers. 3 of them. 3 stickers from Trader Joe’s… You know the ones, they give them to your kid while you stand in the checkout line. 3 perfectly round colorful stickers some cashier at Trader Joe’s gave to some kid.  A kid who likely has a sibling going to class here.  Some kid that had to sit and wait for its older sibling for what must have seemed like hours upon hours. Potentially some kid whose parent was sitting right there not paying attention as the child stuck those 3 perfectly round stickers to the clean, unadorned, pale green half-wall.

I fucking hate that parent.

It took precisely 22 minutes for all my irritation and irrationality to come to head before I took two steps (one forward and one to the side) and removed those 3 perfectly round stickers, strode across the room, and threw them in the trash.

Somehow I’m sure this makes me the crazy one.

No, Cami, you’re not dying.  Nor do you have some strange illness.  You simply ate a lot of beets.  Stop freaking out every time you pee.

(this, my friends, is what passes for blog fodder around here)

Meh: Waking up at 7:30 on a Sunday morning and actually having to drag my ass out of bed and be social and friendly… Not really on the list of stuff I’m good at.  Nor is it on the list of stuff I want to be good at.  But I’ll manage when…

Nice:  My parents are visiting and my dad got up early, wandered out for a walk, got the Sunday newspaper, went to the local coffee shop to get all of us breakfast so we wouldn’t have to cook and mess up the kitchen AND he brought me a mocha.  Who can complain too much when greeted with that knowledge?  Not I.  Though I almost spat “Fuck you” at the table when I was told where to sit.  Not that I had a problem with my location, I’m just a little surly in the morning.

Fucking Bullshit: Sitting at the table and knocking over my mocha when I’ve had only one sip of it.  That sip was enough to tell me that it was a very good mocha and worth drinking.  I got to watch that lovely mocha tumble from the table spilling little drops in seeming slow motion until it tumbled to the floor where the lid popped off and it spilled like a rush of muddy flood water over the hardwood floor.

So I’m drinking tea.

I was happily sitting using an internet connection that was not my own so I could work while waiting for my daughter to get out of class.  Best of both worlds kind of moment.  I’m here waiting when she gets finished and I’m using my time wisely to get work done.  I was feeling downright joyous and a little smug… when low and behold out of nowhere my connection?

Failed.  Kerplop.  Gone.

And I had the gall to be irritated by this.  For a moment I actually became completely indignant because damn it!  My connection was down!  I had no connection!  What on earth is a girl to do when her stolen internet connection goes down and she’s trying to work?!!

Dramatic sigh.

Since I’d planned on working I didn’t bring a book.  The benches are hard.  My day has been lonnnng.  And what do I want?  To work before I go home and get stuff done.

Would it be unreasonable to fall down on the floor rest my head on my big puffy jacket and cry.  Just a little?

Oh.

Okay fine.  I’ll write instead.

I haven’t had cheese puffs in years.  Excuse me.  Cheese Puffs.  They’re a proper noun, right?  Anyway, Cheese Puffs…  I try not to eat them because they have absolutely no redeeming value.  Except the cheesy puffy goodness I recall from my youth.  The savory fluffy cheesy goodness melting on my tongue. Yum.

So even though I do my very best not to keep junk food (that I love) in the house, I bought some Cheese Puffs the other day.  Oh Cheese Puffs.

Sigh.

The bag has been sitting on the counter for a few days.  Whispering to me.  Breathing sweet nothings into my ear as I walk past.  I’ve resisted.

I hold firmly to the belief that resisting temptation at the store it’s easier than resisting temptation at home.  None the less… there are Cheese Puffs here.

And after pulling open the bag and partaking of a few puffs I was… well I was sad.  And disappointed.  And I would leave the post at that if it were not for the fact that the second bowl (I had help getting through the first, I swear) was 10 times cheesier and far less styrofoamy than the first…

Oh cheese puffs… how unsettling you are.

That being said, what’s your favorite oh-so-bad for you treat?

When I was younger I thought I’d be living the life of the Jetson family by now.  I pictured living in my high (high high high) rise condo with flying cars and a robot maid to do my dishes, laundry and clean the floors.  Yeah, even then I knew I’d hate cleaning floors.  As a child growing up in a time when books, movies and even cartoons had a heavy sci-fi leaning I thought I was prepared for the future culture, but that wasn’t so.

My contemporaries and I were prepared for flying cars, teleportation, instant meals, robots, replicants, virtual reality and snazzy jumpsuits.  And while Star Trek may have touched on the moral gray area of the holodeck I don’t seem to recall my sci-fi upbringing touching on the etiquette and moral implications of instant mass communication.  There was no “How to behave on social networks” manual being passed around.  It seemed to sneak into our culture and then explode. Like any community, sites have laws, rules or codes of conduct.  But those are legal issues.  Technical issues.  There are trolls and hostile users and spammers.  But those are not the etiquette issues of which I’m writing.

I’m thinking of people finding out a loved one is dead because someone posted it on facebook.  Mothers learning they’ll become grandmothers because someone blogged about it.  Kids finding out their parent is in the hospital because a family member tweeted it in passing.  In this age of instant communication do we need a manners lesson?  How would I feel if I learned something life altering about my daughter, father, mother, sibling or loved one because of a status update?

Like shit.

Yet I see it over and over again.  My family is just as guilty as any other and I’ve seen hurt feelings running rampant.  And with good reason, people behave thoughtlessly and someone is bound to be wounded.

Is this an issue of navigating the future world we live in or just a matter of common decency?  While having a thick skin isn’t such a bad idea, I think it’s important that we find a way to navigate the world keeping others in mind and find a way to teach future generations to do the same.

Or we can all become part machine.   You know, whichever.

It seems a little odd since I haven’t even found the muse to write here regularly but I’ve decided to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year.  Call me crazy (Really.  It’s okay.  You can.) but I think at the moment it’s a good thing for me.

Do I expect anything grand to come of it?  Nope.  But it’s a nice reminder that I write.  It’s a nice way to push myself in the direction of something I’ve loved as long as I can remember.  Telling a story.  Narrating a tale.  Getting a point across in words.  I remember how proud I was as a kid when I wrote the story of Pepper the cat.  After that it was words words words.  Long stories.  Short.  Tales of fiction.  Stories about my life.  Poetry.  Prose.  I even wrote song lyrics a time or two.

And this time I’m diving into a genre I’m not really to familiar with.  I usually write for myself or for an adult audience, but this time I’m trying something new.  Writing with my kid and her age group in mind.

It’ll be an experiment.  It’ll be an adventure. It’ll be something.  And by something I mean I won’t be using any profanities… so there’s that.