"Fire Bad, Tree Pretty"

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March seems to be about continuing my intellectual break: between the Jersey Girl bounty hunter novels on vacation last month and overdosing on Buffy The Vampire Slayer via Hulu this month I’m thinking my brain has called it quits on thinking/sussing out/deducting/inducting/ or figuring out anything beyond blood sucking demons or bad guys in Atlantic City. I’m not sure if it’s all the crap swirling around me and happening to my family and those I love or if menopause is eating my brain. I’ve been meaning to blog about menopause but I keep forgetting to and then when I remember I just get all choked up about it and grab a cookie instead.

But I have to confess, Buffy is making me happy. I didn’t watch Buffy in the late nineties when it came on television the first time. I wish I could say it’s because I was busy making Dinosaur Dioramas for a third grade project or cupcakes for a preschool. But no I was a Xena girl. Not enough time in my life thirteen years ago for two chop sokey camp-a-thons television shows. Ward blamed Xena: Warrior Princess for the questioning I did about my sexual orientation while I was in therapy eleven years ago. Um…yeah, cuz teevee shows make people gay that’s why everyone who watched Will and Grace have thrown aside their real lives and are in New York City looking for Karen and a cocktail. I wonder if I had watched Buffy all those years ago if I would have gone to a therapist wondering if I were a vampire slayer or a watcher? Good thing I didn’t, my blogging would be from a small room in a quiet hospital.

A padded cell sounds good about now. I managed to ruin both of my sons’ lives last Wednesday before 0730 in the morning! It was awesome! Because everyone knows I live to ruin my kids’ lives: I told Wally he had to get his shit together or he was losing the privilege to drive my car and then I explained to Beav he was going to his dad’s house after school rather than my house (where the PS3 lives). Wow, you would have thought their lives had just become Shakespeare meets Brecht in the level of tragedy I had inflicted upon them both. If I had that kind of power I certainly wouldn’t be exercising it on the likes of them. Hell, I would have sent my favorite president to hate--W--and his little friends up into a roaring puff of smoke about the time Sunnydale was swallowed up by the Hell mouth.

Menopause seems a likely cause for my lackluster intellectual leanings is that it took me AN ENTIRE SEASON of Buffy to figure out the extremely droll irony of a Hell mouth existing under a high school. I had to put the episode on pause so I could laugh and laugh and laugh again when the irony finally sank into my withering gray matter. Then I was halfway through season two when the light bulb went on: Whedon didn’t take the vampire stuff seriously and was poking fun at a genre, himself, and the fans.

I are very smart.

Or maybe I’m taking a brain break because life feels really hard lately. I’m exhausted by a series of bad events taking place in the lives of people I know and love. I’m really tired of worrying I’m coming home to or waking up to a dead dog. I’m sick of nagging a kid about cleaning up after himself or nagging to help around the house (just pick one and I’m nagging at him); I’m sick of the patients who--on some days--feel like Whedonesque demons with bad latex faces and glow in the dark eyes holding me down and sucking my soul out of my open mouth. I think its winter. It’s been dark and gray this winter and we haven’t had as much sun as we usually have. Add a child who feels like a failure at the ripe old age of 19 (Dude, save that for 30 years from now, ok when you‘ve really made some boneheaded mistakes) with a dollop of frustration surrounding the continued disinterest in his sons exhibited by the Asshole I Was Stupid Enough To Breed With, and ice all of that with ever fluctuating hormones and you have the makings of a really hard winter and looking for a friend in Mr. Stabby. Too bad things like a child preceding a parent in death, stage 3 cancer and broken hearts aren’t vampires a slayer could stake in their hearts so they dissolve into a pile of gray ashes.

"Whatever is causing the Joan Collins 'tude, deal with it. Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, but get over it." -- Cordelia

Day Light Savings time has helped tremendously. It’s a pleasure to be sitting here at 1815 and the sun is just beginning to wane. The second Saturday in March springs us forward to summer. Springs me forward to all sorts of things like working in the yard and spanking my inner moppet.