I’ve been spending a great deal of time reading and reviewing other people’s blogs, a labor of love and, sometimes, money. I know you think what I’m about to say next: since I’ve been wrapped up in other people’s blog projects, that’s why I’ve been neglecting my own. Not true. I regularly neglect free fringes. It’s never been on a consistent blogging schedule unless you count the few months lovelinks—now yeah write—took it over like an invasion of pod people. I visit free fringes when I’m surrounded by people and their projects, yet feeling isolated. So I come here for a cup of hot coffee and maybe a few illegal pharmaceuticals. Note to potential employers: I’ve never taken illegal drugs, ever.

Funny side note about that:

Years ago, I ran a survey on my blog asking my readers to pick out the one statement out of four that was untrue. The statements were something like:

1. Beyonce once complimented my singing (I cannot sing)
2. I’ve never tried illegal drugs
3. I’ve had a warrant out for my arrest
4. I throw a Super Bowl party every year for hundreds of people

I’ll be damned, nearly every person chose the never done illegal drugs as the untrue statement. Everything was true except for number four. My feelings were kinda hurt until people explained it’s not that they assumed every black person was a raging crack addict, but that they’d never really met anyone who’d never tried anything at all. Fair enough, people, fair enough.

Q is on his way in for a long weekend, and our house is presently auditioning for an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive. I’m stressed about it, he’s pretending not to be stressed about it. Instead of furiously cleaning, I’m blogging and eating Great Value wavy cut potato chips in bed next to the baby who’s playing Lego Batman. I may or may not be drinking pink lemonade-infused vodka from a red Solo cup. Holy shit, that’s tasty.

I’ve been feeling kinda outside-looking-inny lately, but what else is new? The baby thinks I’m the greatest thing since Cheetos for dinner, my husband loves me, the older ones lurk quietly in their rooms hoping no one asks them to clean anything. It is, for all practical and emotional purposes, a good life I have over here. No matter that my next-door neighbor told me the other day she thought I’d been out of town for weeks because my car hadn’t moved. Yeah, there are days I do not, cannot, leave the house. Our pantry is stocked for Armageddon. If bagged cold cereal is ever called upon during the apocalypse, we’re all set. Still, there is a nagging feeling I should get out more and walk around. Look around. Be around.

Which kinda reminds me: when Q gets here, I hope he can help me find the DVR remote. It’s gotta be around here somewhere.

Did Q even read the post I wrote a few weeks ago crying over my POS laptop? I think he may have missed that one, but he most definitely got to see the laptop first-hand over New Year’s weekend. Food stains, loose keys, missing keys, no memory, all bootleg crazy. It looked so bad, I think Q threw up on it and neither one of us noticed.

So I’m now typing this post on a wonderfully gently used Dell that we got in someone else’s divorce. The keyboard is backlit! I can type by dim lamplight with no problem. When I tap the keys, letters appear on the screen. There are no crumbs on the motherboard. It has not never been touched by anyone under 30 years old. I am giddy with glee.

In a week that Jordan experienced a bullying incident so serious her antagonist was sent to the district’s alternative school, Jordan also got her first boyfriend. Puppy love completely overrode the bullying, and I’ve heard 100 more stories about her new man than I ever did about the knucklehead (different boy) who’d apparently been spending the school year mercilessly teasing my daughter. Puppy love also encouraged her to quit the bowling team so they could spend more time on their texting machines, and they’ve made plans for Jordan’s first formal event and very first date with a boy in February. She’s a nervous, crying, emotional wreck.

I told him all about my stroke, and he doesn’t even care, Mommy. He says it’s okay because he has Alzheimer’s.

Sigh. Or something that starts with an A, I guess. Take your pick. He’s a nice kid. It doesn’t really matter what he has that she managed to process as dementia. They are kind of adorable together.

In other news, neither Jon Alex nor Ehren found themselves dropped off at a firestation this week under the Safe House ordinance, so that’s progress.

Linking up today with the good folk at the Memories Captured meme on my friend Alison’s blog.

With Jordan in her infant carrier as I was standing on the porch of my aunt’s house ringing the doorbell, one of my crazy head voices told me Jordan was going to die when she was 16.

Because I am no more sane than any of my crazy head voices, I spent the next 16 years waiting for Jordan to die.

The day she turned 16, I was relieved we’d made it through until another crazy head voice reminded me that no one had said she would die on her 16th birthday. Maybe they’d all kinda meant her 16th year.

So I spent all last year waiting for her 17th birthday. Oh, and getting professional help. Anxiety disorder will kill you faster than any car accident or cancer, I’ve discovered. The black mold in your house from the lack of housekeeping due to the accompanying depression is deadlier than anything Web MD can come up with.

She’s 17, and she’s here. Still motherfucking brain-injured, goddammit, but she’s here. The group of special ed strategists at her school gave me an application for a state program that would accompany Jordan to whatever teenage, part-time job she may get and stay with her on the job until the program determines she’s caught on well enough to work on her own. I’ve had that application for a month now. I touched it yesterday. It’s got some sort of grape beverage stains on it (my night stand experiences regular juice and liquor spillage), but it’s still presentable enough to be completed and submitted. Noooooooooooo.

Jordan with a job I cannot handle. When she’s at school, I know she’s at school. More than a few state laws keep her behind school doors. When she’s in her room at home, I know she’s downloading iTunes and not cleaning her room. A job means cranky customers are yelling at her and asshole managers are accusing her of not moving fast enough. If I want her bossed around by mean and cranky assholes, she might as well stay at home with us. At least we let her go lie down when she gets tired.

Perhaps embarrassed by their failed prophecy and high on Xanax, the crazy head voices are silent today. I’ll be spending the day washing  Jordan’s bed linens and cleaning her room as a surprise birthday present. [Get thee behind me, chronic laziness.] Q and Jordan share music and shoe fetishes, so Jordan is already ecstatic over her birthday running shoes and iTunes gift card from him. I just went ahead and signed everybody’s names to the loot from him to make us look good.

Happy birthday, Jordan. Wait: the crazy head voices just now revised their prediction to when you’re 40, but I told them to shut it.

The Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop is coming up in April, and there are four scholarships available for writers who win their writing contest. I’d really like attend the workshop, so I set aside my fear of writing contests and entered this one, my first judged submission in three years.

Linking it up with lovelinks, my own curated weekly contest that will open Tuesday at midnight, for kicks.

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When I write about writing, I’m writing about failure.

As a girl, I had three important things on my grocery list: children, husband, writing career. I sat at my mother’s kitchen table reading the back of the Kellogg’s packaging and thinking: somebody has to write the words on the back of this box. Why can’t it be me? Of course, I was too young to know the person writing those words on the back of that box had been likely plotting for years his fiery escape from a copywriter’s cubicle with a complicated scheme to take Martha from payroll down with him as payback for the great vacation day mishap of ’78. I know now his name was Jim.

Because I am American, it’s not enough that I eventually checked each item off my girlhood list. Simply checking off is for Scandinavians and a few indigenous Turks. Pure Americans like me are constantly weighing and measuring themselves against another American’s idea of personal success. Eh, my kids are good kids, but how is my parenting? On a scale of one to eleven, I give myself a two. Wait, a three. Points on because none of them is the class bully. Points on because they all own toothbrushes. An extra point for not making them forage for dinner behind the local office park.

Subjecting my poor husband to me as his life partner: points off, points off, points off.  Points on for love, though. You hear me, Jeffrey? Points on for love.

A writing career, the third item of my list, is all points off. I went from dreaming on the back of a cereal box to later losing confidence as a fiction writer. In my teens, John Steinbeck encouraged me to pick up a pen. In my twenties, Gabriel Garcia Marquez knocked the pen from my hand with a deft left hook and some trash talk. My thirties watched in horror as Oprah crowned kings and queens of literature cheered on by a Greek chorus of housewives. My writer’s suicide note was found written in blue ink on the proper side of a job application.

From our work cubicles, Jim the Kellogg’s copywriter and I fight over the serial comma. We offer oil executives trivia lessons on typography. We know the exact moment people stop caring about what we know and just want their goddamned report edited by five on Thursday. My success as a writer is no longer measured against dreams, but against my willingness to adhere to an overly strict policy of font usage. With eyes dead from arguing how many spaces go after a period (one, just one) Jim gestures toward the break room. The coffee’s done.

Besides missing Ehren, who’s been gone eight days now, and being generally bummed about my employment situation, I’m blaming this current malaise on you. Well, I am if you’re completely happy with your life right now and offering those stupidly sunny Facebook updates. Not if you’re neither of those.

I’ve become much better at accepting life’s little hiccups as life’s little hiccups as opposed to my previous habit of looking for someone to blame (see previous paragraph). Sometimes life is just life and there’s nothing you can do about it. I used to write out all the butt hurt and confusion in my journals which turned from paper to digital paper once I started a blog. It was me and two other people hanging out and practicing rhyming our suicide notes with orange. Then I got more readers. Readers who were of the “chin up” variety, and writing it all out wasn’t as therapeutic or as fun anymore.

It became me and my thoughts and my kids and their loud chewing. Why? Why do kids chew so loudly? Is it the size of their jaws relative to what they’re stuffing in them? The enthusiastic movements of their lips? Why is every single meal I eat with them accompanied by a soundtrack arranged, it seems, by Randy Newman? It’s probably just me. They are like roommates who use the last of the toilet paper without buying more and who drink the last Sprite without telling anybody. Those roommates would also get pegged as loud chewers simply due to my level of annoyance. I’m a terrible person.

Sometimes, I buy myself stuff to make me feel better. It used to be $500 fall jackets. These days, it’s an upsized value meal at Chick-fil-A. I’ve also recently discovered photo editing tools. I don’t need them. But buying them keeps the $500 going toward rent and away from a fifth pair of custom baby seal leather boots. It’s a compensation model I’m comfortable with, thanks. I don’t exactly deserve it, I’m just keeping the demons at bay. Work with me, judgmental people. Work with me.

It’s the end of December, so I get to wish you well in the new year. May your roommates chew softly on food they’ve purchased themselves. If they are as young as mine are, may they at least put their dishes in the sink after a bit of a rinse.

It’s wine for me tonight (I’m out of vodka) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I shall order up my own damn sushi tomorrow for lunch. Your swinging new year’s eve plans in comments…

Some of their complaints have merit, some don’t. Our little family is like the customer service counter at Walmart: we’ll take anything back and will find a way to write it off. And, like Walmart customer service, our family is run by a middle-aged black lady who likes her job well enough, but probably didn’t dream of this exact position as a young girl. She carries a flask as she polices the stock room, and that makes it all a little better.

We opened our Christmahanukwanzaakah presents today on Christmas Eve. The baby is in north Texas with the other side of his family, and we were sitting here bored and broke after Jon Alex nearly burned down the kitchen trying to reheat rotisserie chicken. @FloodG sent us jewelry and tiaras and magic and toys considered illegal south of the Canadian border. Santa brought Jordan salon-quality hair styling implements, and Jon Alex is now Harry Potter Central. I’m sure there’s a more Harry Potter-centric word I could have used, but I don’t know shit about Harry Potter, and I’m not Googling. Ehren’s grandparents sent us peace and quiet by keeping Ehren for the week, Lego and iTunes. Oh, and new studio photos of Ehren which will meet the scanner within the next few weeks. Thanks, Flood, Santa and Nana!

The complaints have been squashed for now, so I won’t get into them. I soothed the kids’ hurt feelings with presents and my own hurt feelings with Firefly sweet tea bourbon courtesy of my favorite husband Q. It may or may not have been bad timing that my depression drug study ended right before the holidays, well known as the most stressful time of the year for many people. I may or may not have a moderate stash of Xanax in my night stand drawer, so maybe fuck the drug study, right? I may or may not be all good, depression study be damned.

So now we’re spending the rest of the evening giving each other palm readings and Cosmo-type quizzes through iPhone apps, watching NFL football (me) and playing Lego Harry Potter (them). We may make some hot chocolate if I can drag myself into the kitchen. I got new jammies for Christmahanukwanzaakah, so I’m quite comfy in my room. Oooh, and later, pictures of my new shoes from Q: pink and purple Adidas Sambas. Thanks, sweetie!

I’m now taking an iPhone health quiz that’s telling my kids I’ll be dead by 50 (okay, okay, 83). Thanks, free iPhone apps, you’re awesome.

Happy Christmahanukwanzaakah, everybody. Thanks for spending time with me here at the fringe since 2006 or since the day you accidentally fell into my life. When I stop blogging at age 82 1/2, I will think fondly of all of you.