Hell called. It wants its heat back.

Those weather people. So creative.

I’ll go ahead and warn you up front: this entire post is a long, drawn out complaint about the heat. Ready? Here goes:

1. It’s so hot that my ass sticks to everything.

2. It’s so hot that pipes can’t produce cold water.

3. It’s so hot that birds don’t have the energy to shit on my car.

4. It’s so hot that my deodorant doesn’t work anymore; I stink by 9am.

5. It’s so hot here that no one is at the pool.

6. It’s so hot that being naked won’t even cool you off.

7. It’s too hot to eat.

8. It’s too hot to sleep.

9. It’s almost too hot to type.

10. It’s so hot my cactus plants are dying.

11. It’s hot enough to melt my jewelry.

12. It’s so hot my coworker’s windshield exploded. True story.

I would write more, but frankly, it’s just too hot. And this is enough complaining for one afternoon. I wish you all a wonderful, cool weekend. I will be packing for my beach trip, going to see my shrink, having lunch with a friend, and sleeping in the freezer.

No, I’m not dead, as far as I know.

I don’t know quite where to start. I have neglected this blog, my readers and my propensity to overshare and write things that shouldn’t be written.

The last time I posted I said that I was experiencing anxiety again, and I wasn’t sure if I was really ready to let go of it – or it of me. A few of you commented that, essentially, it’s not my choice whether or not I go through panic and anxiety, and of course you’re right. But it’s creeping up again nonetheless and I am planning a little re-check for myself sometime in the near future to see if I can get a handle on this.

There are extenuating circumstances, however. One – the biggest one that’s kept me away from here – is that my invitation and stationery business is actually starting to get going. (And by get going, I mean that I’ve filled a few orders and have talked up a big game.) I absolutely love it, but I am absolutely terrified. My days are filled with emails and phone calls to business-owning friends, asking questions about taxes, licenses and ID numbers. My nights are filled now with a burning desire not to DVR “American Idol,” but alas I am laying out and designing my wares and so I’ve been reduced to reading recaps of my favorite shows online and getting updates from my Twitter friends.

I didn’t know this is what I wanted to do, and six months from now, this may not be what I want to do. I know – and regardless of who reads this, I am freely admitting – that I am completely and totally burned out at my job. What was once a thrill and a calling for me is now a chore and a source of income. I am ashamed to say that, but it’s the truth. Part of me feels guilty because I have this unspoken commitment to my students, this feeling of obligation until they have graduated and successfully joined the workforce again. But a larger part of me feels incredibly stifled, antsy and insanely unhappy. I don’t dread coming to work (yet), but I don’t think of it fondly as I used to, and I don’t feel a huge sense of loyalty to this school, like I used to. I’m just burned out. This 40-watt light bulb has done used up all its juice.

Another reason I’ve neglected posting regularly is because I am a little aghast at some goings-on in the blog world. I’ve said before – plainly and not-so-plainly – that there is a circle of well-known bloggers who contain themselves to themselves, if that makes sense. For well over a year now, I’ve been on the outside looking in, wishing I had the traffic they did, wishing I had the design skills or the wit or the talent for doing this online weblog thing. But recently – and as usual, I’m not getting into details – a lot of ugly heads have emerged, revealing sides of people I didn’t know existed. That’s the danger of making online friends, you know. People present the good sides of themselves, only the aspects of their personalities they want others to see. I think we all do that to a certain degree, but in the face of adversity or conflict, a person’s character is tested and revealed. I have wanted to acknowledge some of this bloggy drama but I haven’t known how to say what I wanted to say. None of the bloggers involved in the recent brouhaha read this or even in reality know who I am; nevertheless I have felt the urge to bring this up, if only to say that my instincts to stay out of the way served me well and my integrity is (I believe) still intact. Sometimes laying low is the only way to lay (stop it with the grammar corrections – I know it’s wrong) and if I’m good at anything, it’s laying around. High or low or in between.

Okay, so on to other things, if you’re still reading.

House improvements are moving forward and it’s starting to look less like we live in a crack house and more like we just moved in last week and are overhauling the mess the previous owners left. BB turns 36 tomorrow. I still haven’t graduated from school. I fell off my shoes in a parking lot on Monday and sprained my ankle. BB and I will celebrate our sixth anniversary next weekend. The cats are still bringing in live (and dead) animals and my book club is still going strong – though again, I have neglected our online presence.

(Incidentally, if you’d like to read along, we just finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and are starting The Double Comfort Safari Club: The New No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. We also are eating a lot of dips, cheese and crackers, and macaroons. Feel free to join in on that, too.)

If you’d like to stalk my new business – but promise not to send me hate mail or some poisonous powder in a suspicious envelope – you can become a fan of Noteworthy Invitations on Facebook, or follow Noteworthy on Twitter (@NWInvites). Be kind, please; I’m just starting out.

For those of you very loyal people, I apologize for indulging myself in explanations and rambling. For those of you who have disappeared for lack of content to ridicule, meh. I kind of don’t care.

Fallout Girl

Tuesday night…

Me: Hey, I’m running some errands after work but I’ll be home soon.

Me: Scratch that. I’m headed to A’s house for a little bit, but I’ll be home at 6:45 at the latest.

Me: (Leaves phone inside during surprise boat ride around the lake.)

BB: Uh, dinner’s ready. Thought you’d be home now.

BB: Dinner’s getting cold. I guess I’ll fix myself a plate.

BB: So I don’t know where you are TWO HOURS LATER. Also, I don’t know if you’ve eaten. And finally, I worked really hard on this belated Easter dinner.

Me: Oops…

Wednesday at lunch…

Me: (Out of the office for a while.)

BB: I made us steak over chopped salads for lunch. What time are you coming home?

Me: Oh. I guess I didn’t tell you that I couldn’t come home for lunch today…

BB: Scary, disappointed silence.

My aunt says that the best advice she’s ever gotten and given in regard to confrontation is to reverse roles. There’s nothing I hate more than calling someone’s cell phone and not getting an answer, particularly a family member who should be reachable at that moment in time. Or when you promise me you’ll show up at 6:45 and you don’t come home until 8. It’s inconsiderate, it’s disrespectful but good God y’all – that was one fun boat ride, I kid you not.

I fucked up, Internet. Twice this week. I’m betting on a third time before it’s all over with, mainly because I am THAT smart.

Steel Reserve

Yesterday, or was it the day before?, I got my first taste of hate mail, from a delightful troll named “Joenunya.” Joe kindly pointed out on my post about being snowed in that I was a) high maintenance, b) lazy and therefore should be deserted by my husband and c) probably fat based on the way I “sound.”

Joe, I gotta tell you, you’re right on the nose.

I spend a lot of time wrapped up in my own world, spiraled down inside my head, thinking about what other people secretly think of me while they’re really smiling and nodding and gently patting me on the arm. I think about what is said about me behind my back, or the impression I really have of myself if I were honest and true and I stopped to listen to the voice in my head. And the truth is, no one ever says what they think to my face. Or to your face.

So Joe, for telling me – albeit behind the veil of the interwebs and all their security – straight to my face exactly what you think of me, THANK YOU. I think those exact same things every day of my life but never have the audacity to say them out loud to myself.

Now. Before I get all soap-boxy and holier than thou, I would like to say that I also think Joe’s an asshole for trolling around and leaving anonymous comments – if you’re going to say something shitty, be legit. But in the grand scheme of things, Joe’s not all that important even though he was a milestone in my bloggery. (I’m a big deal now! Big deals get haters, right?)

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One of my co-workers committed suicide this week. It was a tragic, horrific situation brought on by the death of her husband last summer, and all of us that knew her felt that we could have prevented this in some way. She was the housekeeper for our department and we saw her each day, talking to her for a while if we felt up to making an attempt at lifting
her spirits or selfishly avoiding her if we didn’t. Her despair was something I personally have never seen before. It consumed her life, the life of her child and the lives of her friends and family. It caused her to suffer in ways most of us can’t imagine and, in my opinion, it caused a depression so deep I’m not sure professional help could have reversed it. But each day that we saw her and spoke to her, we all heard her references to death or suicide, and so Monday when we heard the news, we were stunned but not shocked. It was a terrible ending to an already awful story, and now there is a young boy who is without the two people most important to him in the world. Suicide is never the answer, but arguing with a mind that is already made up is futile.

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I wrote this part of the post earlier before my computer died. Right here was where I asked you and myself questions about death, blogging, politics, religion and the other shit that’s taboo at the dinner table. I don’t have the energy to rewrite it, but I still want those questions out there. Maybe this weekend.

Shit that happened while I was snowed in

Interneeeeet! What up? You’d think that while I was chillaxin’ with my homies snowed in for the last four days that I would have churned out post after intelligent post. You’d be wrong. I’m going to make a list now that will enlighten you about what I’ve been doing since Friday night’s crippling dusting of snow major winter storm.

1. I watched the news for school closings, only to discover that our website updates quicker. Go us, because usually our website announces closings about 10 minutes before the work day is scheduled to begin. Fuck ups.

2. I watched most of the stuff on my DVR. I’m down to 42% full. Trust me, this is like empty in my house. I caught up on Big Love – oh! – and I totally should mention this, because if you watch Big Love on HBO, you totally have to read this book. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (do you love how I just correctly titled this book without quotation marks or italics? English majors RULE!) by Jon Krakauer. It’s about this woman and her child who are murdered by two Mormon fundamentalists and it gives this big long history of Mormons. I will mention here that I grew up with a slew of Mormons and those in the regular garden variety LDS church are super nice people. But it’s those Big Love Juniper Creek creepies that this book talks about. Anyway, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff it’s a good read.

3. I started watching The Tudors. Shut UP that shit is good. First of all there’s some hot sex in it, which kept BB interested of course, and then there’s Henry VIII who is eight different kinds of beautiful and then there’s Sam Neill who does a decent British accent and then there are all the jewels and fabulous fabric in the costumes and do you get Showtime? Catch up. RIGHT NOW. They’re showing seasons 1-3 and you should catch it while the catching’s good.

4. I slept. I slept in in the morning, I took naps, I permanently squished the cushion down in my Archie Bunker chair in the den, so now it looks like a butt pancake. I laid around on the couch. I stretched out with the ottoman and listened to BB hand wash dishes because our dishwasher melted. I waited for him to cook dinner. I showered occasionally. I was a ROCK STAR.

5. Our dishwasher melted. So now BB we have to hand wash our dishes and dry them and hope we rinsed the soap off good because I can tell you from experience that soapy Cheerios are not so tasty. Yesterday we ventured out into the scary world of icy parking lots and bought a shiny new Whirlpool stainless dishwasher. It’s so pretty. And supposedly you can put dishes in there WITHOUT SCRUBBING THEM FIRST! That would be a miracle. And BB bought it with his own money that I didn’t have to contribute to. It was a great moment in my life.

6. I made whole wheat bagels. Those fuckers are N-A-S-T-Y. They are hard as rocks, dense as rocks and taste like rocks. I asked my good Interweb friend Ashley Gross to come up with a recipe to replace these things. She’s working on it.

7. I played 1,764 games of some kind of Solitaire variation on my iTouch. Maybe not that many games, but it seemed like it. Once I found myself in the kitchen looking for Diet Sunkist and I couldn’t see the fridge because my eyes were blurry from looking at the screen too long. I need an intervention.

8. I started The Lovely Bones last night and almost finished it. I had to stay up until almost 1am though and by the time I got good and asleep, the alarm went off. Good grief. I have to say though, after all those days of slugging it around the house, it was a little bit nice to get back into a routine this morning.

9. In case you haven’t gathered by now, North Carolina shuts down completely when it snows and sleets. COMPLETELY. Schools closed, businesses on delays, snow plows doing their best but not enough. It’s enough to make an outsider nuts, but it’s what we’re used to. They’re calling for more Friday. I might shoot myself.

10. BB tried to tell me what to do. I shut him down. We’re headed to the beach for an early Valentine’s vacation Friday, and if his ‘tude doesn’t change, I’m shutting him down again. On vacation. In a fancy hotel. You know what this means, people. SHUTTING IT DOWN.

On the Internet, there were good recaps of the Grammys (holy shit Pink!) and there were friends that joined Twitter and Tom and Lorenzo of Project Rungay did some super funny posts about Kelly Cutrone (Kell on Earth) and RuPaul.

OK. That’s the shit that happened while I was snowed in.