You can call me Pill Lady, or PL for short. I’ve become a pharmacy of all manner of pills in the last week and a half, ones with names like Detrol, Ditropan, Macrobid, and my personal savior, Xanax. Even though I’m almost through with the antibiotics, I still don’t feel normal. I’m tired, spacey and still prone to a pissy bladder at any given time. And goddamnit I have lost my reason for getting up in the morning—nay, my reason for LIVING—that nice, hot cup o coffee at 8am. Lord have mercy.

We have a renter for the mobile home, though there have been…complications. The guy called last night to report that he couldn’t fit his furniture through the doors or windows or anything else (remember, we’re talking a single wide), which could do in what we thought was a sealed deal. Apparently his wife has all of this big and heavy oak furniture that all matches and probably looks great and fits in anything but a shoebox. Bruce spent the better part of last night fretting about this unhappy development until I finally gave up one of my precious X pills at 3am.

The twins will be three in a few weeks, and that means I am supposed to be calling around to reserve clowns and bouncy houses and DJs and hey, why not rent Shamu to perform tricks in a little pool in the backyard? Instead, Bruce and went down to the party store and selected the only theme we could stomach—Sesame Street—but I skipped the invitations because I still held out that I would be able to produce invitations worthy of artistic merit. I actually began looking for my old Martha “I Cannot Be Destroyed” Stewart magazines for ideas (ha ha! Was I insane?). I couldn’t find them, and it occurred to me I was wasting so much time looking for ideas I could have done them already, so fuck it, I did Evites.

The girls still strangely refer to themselves in the third person, though a lot of their playmates have been using “I” and “I’m” for a long time. I am not sure why this is. My suspicions lie with the twinness—that the very fact they have each other to repeat the same way of saying things with each other constantly is naturally self-reinforcing, I suppose. Other kids their age have always seemed slightly ahead with language and I have thought this must have something to do with the fact that when you have just one kid, they get a much higher concentration of language nuances and parental attention in general. Though when I think about how badly I screw up French, it amazes me they can communicate pronouns at all.

There are two really easy ways to tell them apart now. One insists on wearing two different colored socks every day (no, they absolutely cannot match), and the other insists on being addressed as “Mouse.” And if you forget, she will correct you. Every time. Too many Leo Lionni videos, perhaps.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading more. Not that I have any more time to do so—actually, a lot less—but the palpable sense that my brain is slipping into a kind of dull, grey world of torpidity from lack of stimulation has been nagging at me for months. When Boohbahs and Richard Scarry videos become high art it’s time to make a reading list. Now, I received a number of good books for Christmas, but none of them are the kind of books that give your brain cells that kind of intellectual massage I’m talking about: one is a book on integrating Photoshop with Dreamweaver, which turned out to offer virtually nothing I haven’t figured out already, and the other is a book on hacking Moveable Type, which is so technical and frightening that I doubt I would ever really be able to decipher it even with unlimited espresso and no distractions whatsoever.

I need to stop adding books to the wishlist that I haven’t actually looked through in the bookstore.

So, off to the library I went, and brought home one of the books that was actually on my sister’s wishlist. because I figure if there’s one more fantastic way I can annoy her it’s reading all her favorite books she doesn’t have time to read. (Consider this my revenge for hanging up on my answering machine). Nickel and Dimed is a wonderful book. Not just because it skips academic formality, but it’s genuinely entertaining and reminds me, painfully, of why and how I managed to have 35 jobs by the time I was 27 years-old. If you have read this book, then you already understand. It’s still, I think, a little bit of a mystery to my husband, whose shit-job experiences all occurred in the 60s and 70s. This was the era before the complete corporatization of everything (think, the perennial McDonald’s job everyone makes fun of didn’t even exist in the 60s), the breakdown of family networks, and even the lowest wages often passed for some semblance of a living wage before the reign of Republican inflation. It really was a whole different world. The author of the book is a Boomer too, and while she hasn’t ventured any comparisons between the different eras yet, her shock at this new world she cast herself into is most amusing. So far the most interesting part for me is the section where she takes on a housecleaning job, since I did this myself for a while in college. (She does this to supplement her other job, in order to make ends meet). Everything she wrote about was so familiar: the moronic bosses, the nasty clients with mansions half the size of the White House, the lockouts and “forgetting” to pay, the gossip, the dizziness from lack of food and sheer exhaustion, and my favorite, the clients that would deliberately hide dustballs in absurd places, and should you fail this little test it was an excuse to call your manager and complain that you didn’t really clean the place AT ALL and so NO I’M NOT PAYING. And the leaving cash out thing. You know, to see if you steal it or not.

I’m already halfway through the book and I can’t wait to read her next one.

The other resolution is start taking yoga again. And go to the gym more—though this item is really up to the girls, as it depends whether or not they feel like being babysat in the gym playroom, which lately has only been 50% of the time.

My final New Years’s resolutions: all catalogs mailed to this house go straight in the trash recycle bin, Martha Stewart magazines are banned indefinitely, and try to learn to love Postum.

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You may have heard we’ve had a lot of rain
Treehugger
Elmo says: Who wants to die?
O! Didn’t we tell you to beware? O! Yes we did! I love her husband’s sense of humor
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